Lisa Allette Brooks holds a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the Department of History, Classics, and Religion. Lisa studies the history and practice of medicine and healing in first millennium South Asia and contemporary ayurvedic medicine in Kerala with a focus on gendered medical embodiment, sensory knowledges, and multispecies medicine. Lisa’s current book project, Leech Trouble: Therapeutic Entanglements in More-Than-Human Medicine, is a history of human-leech medicine in South Asia and a comparative ethnography of leech therapy in contemporary ayurvedic medicine and biomedicine. Lisa’s recent publications include “The Vascularity of Ayurvedic Leech Therapy” in Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35.1 (2021), “A Surgeon’s Hand” in Asian Medicine 15.1 (2020), and “Whose Life is Water, Whose Food is Blood” in Fluid Matter(s) ANU press (2020). Lisa co-edited special issue of Asian Medicine, “Medicines and Memories in South Asia” 15.1 (2020) and is the South Asia book review editor for the journal Asian Medicine and reviews editor for History of Science in South Asia. Lisa completed a PhD in South and Southeast Asian Studies with Designated Emphases in both Science and Technology Studies and in Women, Gender, and Sexuality at UC Berkeley.
For more information about Lisa’s work see: https://ualberta.academia.edu/LisaBrooks
Research Interests:
- Feminist, Marxian, Postcolonial Theory
- Critical Race, Anti-Caste, Indigenous and Colonial Studies
- Cultural Politics of Development, Gender, and Nationalism
- Performance, Political Activism, and Feminist Praxis
- South Asia, South Asians in Canada
My research and teaching focuses on transnational feminist and de/anti/post/colonial approaches to state violence, development discourses, and activism. Read more at my University website.
