Katherine A. Mason is a medical anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in China and the U.S. Her research addresses issues in medical anthropology, population health, bioethics, China studies, reproductive health, mental health, and global health. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic, based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China on the transformation of public health in China following the 2003 SARS epidemic, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. Infectious Change won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize from the British Sociological Association in 2019. Her scholarly work has appeared in American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, The China Journal, International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, and the Journal of Infectious Diseases, among many other venues.
Mason is co-founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project (PJP), a multidisciplinary effort to build an archive of diverse populations' experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic in the form of text, voice and image-based journals. PJP has collected nearly 27,000 journal entries and accompanying survey data from more than 1,800 people in more than 50 countries since May 2020. The Project has received national and international media attention from multiple news outlets including the New York Times and NPR. Mason is PI, with Co-PIs Andrea Flores (Brown Education) and Sarah Willen (UConn Anthropology), of an NSF-funded study of first-generation college students and their parents during Covid-19 that uses the PJP platform to follow families over a period of two years. She is also working with Flores, Willen, and Brown post-doctoral fellow Heather Wurtz (PSTC) on a Peterson Foundation-funded study of immigrant women to New York City during Covid-19, also using the PJP platform. Addtionally, Mason is PI of an NSF-funded project in collaboration with Yifeng Cai (Brown PhD '23), which draws upon interviews and social media to track the Covid-19 experiences of Shanghai residents from the beginning of the pandemic through the present.
In addition to her work on Covid-19, Mason is currently working on a book project on perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMADs), based on several years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork that she conducted in the U.S. and China between 2015 and 2021. As part of this project, she became a certified postpartum doula (DONA International, 2018) and earned a certificate in maternal mental health (Postpartum Support International and 2020 Mom, 2017).
Mason currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology. She also is affiliated with Brown's Population Studies and Training Center, and the Program in Science and Technology Studies, and was a Faculty Fellow at the Swearer Center from 2018-21. She has previously served as Director of Undergraduate Research and Director of Undergraduate Community Engagement. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Peterson Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, U.S. Fulbright program, and Association for Asian Studies. She has previously held positions as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar (2013-2015) and a Lecturer in the Health and Societies program at the University of Pennsylvania (2011-2013). She received her PhD in Social Anthropology from Harvard University in 2011.
