Dr. Victoria M. Massie is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rice University, with faculty affiliations in the Center for African & African American Studies (CAAAS), the Medical Humanities and the Science & Technology Studies (STS) programs, the Center for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality (CSWGS), and the English Department. As an anthropologist of science & medicine, her research and teaching focuses on the limits of embodied knowledge, notably in tandem with transformations in global racialization processes.

Working between Cameroon and the United States, her first book (in progress) examines how ancestry reconnection programs – efforts to bring genetic diasporans “home” – emerge as new care regime, in which the unfamiliarity of a genetic diaspora offers new ground to speculate, prospect, and recoup a future otherwise chronically undermined by the legacy of the postcolonial nation-building project at “home.”

Dr. Massie’s new research projects currently focus on chronic stress and experimenting with illness narratives. In collaboration with Dr. Amarilys Estrella, she has been examining how statelessness emerges as a chronic health condition for Black (im)migrants in the city of Houston, and the state of Texas more broadly. Her second book project is a memoir of generational weathering in North Carolina & the U.S. South.

COURSES

Black Anthropology
Black Feminist Science & Technology Studies
Illness Narratives: Rewriting Health Inequalities
Medical Anthropology
Social Life of DNA

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Spillers's baby, anthropology's maybe: a postgenomic reckoning, Feminist Anthropology Journal