Holly Donahue Singh is a visiting assistant professor at Kenyon. Trained in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia, she has been traveling to India for study and research since 1998. Her work in India includes a year spent conducting research as a Fulbright Scholar in 2000-2001 and a year spent as a Junior Research Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Her doctoral dissertation draws on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, the state capital city and administrative center of Indias most populous state and a major center of Indo-Muslim culture and population. She examines how women suffering from infertility describe their desire for children and attempt to fulfill that desire through strategies ranging from treatment through biomedical and South Asian medical systems, including new reproductive technologies, to adoption and other forms of child circulation. She analyzes how religion, class, and consciousness of social stigma shape the experiences of people suffering from infertility who seek to actualize or approximate their goal of acquiring aulad (progeny). Her work brings together her interests in cultural and medical anthropology of South Asia, Hindi and Urdu language and literature, and gender studies.

Education

M.A., Ph.D., University of Virginia
A.B., Kenyon College

Selected Publications

In press, December 2011. Review of Poor and Pregnant in New Delhi by Helen Vallianatos. To appear in Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
2007. Notes from the Field. Council on Anthropology and Reproduction Newsletter 14(2):10.
2006. Give Me Your Sorrows. Translation of Urdu short story, Apne Dukh Mujhe De Do by Rajinder Singh Bedi. Annual of Urdu Studies 21: 250-272.

Courses Taught

ANTH 113: Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
WMS 330: Feminist Theory