Elisabeth Hsu

Elisabeth Hsu is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, and Fellow of Green Templeton College. She joined Oxford in 2001 to establish the Medical Anthropology MSc and MPhil courses and became Professor in Anthropology in 2010. She co-founded the Anthropology Research Group at Oxford on Eastern Medicines and Religions (ARGO-EMR) and the Berghahn book series "Epistemologies of Healing."

Her educational background is highly transdisciplinary:

• Learned modern Chinese at Beijing Language Institute (1978-79)
• BSc/MSc equivalent in Biology, Ecology at ETH Zurich (1979-84)
• MPhil in General Linguistics at University of Cambridge (1986-87)
• PhD in Social Anthropology at University of Cambridge (1987-92)
• Habilitation in Chinese Studies at University of Heidelberg (2002)

Professor Hsu's research spans medical anthropology, ethnobotany, and the history of science and medicine, with particular focus on Chinese medicine. Her work examines pulse diagnosis, body and personhood, sensory experience, and knowledge transmission. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in China (Yunnan province), East Africa, and Southwest China, exploring Chinese medicine's global circulation and adaptation. Her approach integrates linguistic anthropology, textual analysis, and embodied practice to understand medical traditions across cultural contexts.

Her recent publications reveal a growing interest in sensory anthropology, pandemic responses, and the material culture of medicine. There's a clear trajectory from historical studies of Chinese medical texts toward contemporary analyses of medical pluralism, with increasing attention to embodied experience, affect, and cross-cultural healing practices. Her work bridges historical scholarship with contemporary medical anthropology, creating innovative frameworks for understanding medical traditions globally.

She has supervised numerous doctoral students whose research spans diverse topics from Chinese medicine in East Africa to kinship and relatedness in Southwest China. Her mentorship approach emphasizes rigorous ethnographic methods combined with deep engagement with medical theory across cultural contexts. She has been instrumental in building Oxford's medical anthropology program into one of the world's leading centers for the study of traditional and alternative medicines.

Professor Hsu co-founded the ongoing Berghahn book series "Epistemologies of Healing" to increase the reach of doctoral-research-based monographs and established ARGO-EMR for post-doctoral researchers interested in medical anthropological approaches to scholarly medical traditions. Her latest ethnography "Chinese Medicine in East Africa: An Intimacy with Strangers" was published in 2022.