Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Katherine A. Mason is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a medical anthropologist of China and the U.S. Her research addresses issues in population health, bioethics, China studies, reproductive health, mental health, and global health. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic (Stanford University Press, 2016), based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China following the 2003 SARS epidemic, won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize from the British Sociological Association in 2019. Since 2020, she has been working on several projects in both the U.S. and China focused on COVID-19. She is cofounder 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. The project has received national and international media attention and was recently featured in the international traveling exhibition, “Picturing the Pandemic.” She is working on several spin-off projects using the PJP platform, including an NSF-funded study with Assistant Professor of Education Andrea Flores on first-generation college students’ experiences of COVID-19. In addition to her work on COVID-19, Mason also studies perinatal mood and anxiety disorders in the U.S. and China.