Sarah S. Willen

Associate Professor of Anthropology, UConn | Co-Founder, the Pandemic Journaling Project

Sarah S. Willen is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Connecticut, where she also directs the Research Program on Global Health & Human Rights at the Human Rights Institute. A medical and sociocultural anthropologist, she is author or editor of four books, five special issues, and several dozen articles and book chapters. Her book, Fighting for Dignity: Migrant Lives at Israel’s Margins (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), was awarded the Edie Turner First-Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology (2020) and the Yonathan Shapiro Prize for Best Book in Israel Studies from the Association for Israel Studies (2019) and named Finalist for a Jordan Schnitzer Award from the Association for Jewish Studies (2020). 

Sarah is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University (BA) and Emory University (PhD, MPH) and a former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Fulbright-Hayes, the Wenner Gren Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among other funders. She is Principal Investigator of ARCHES | the AmeRicans’ Conceptions of Health Equity Study, and Co-Founder of the Pandemic Journaling Project.