معرفی
Emily Ng is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences, where she also teaches in the MD-PhD program. Her research focuses on madness, cosmopolitics, and the interplay between historical trauma and contemporary subjectivity in China. She combines clinical training as a therapist with anthropological fieldwork, exploring how psychic life intersects with political and cultural dynamics.
Ng holds a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, with a joint program at UC San Francisco. Her book A Time of Lost Gods: Madness, Mediumship, and the Ghost after Mao (2020), awarded the Boyer Prize, examines post-Mao mental health and cosmological frameworks through ethnographic research in hospitals, temples, and rural communities. Her work challenges secularization narratives by highlighting the persistence of spiritual and political legacies in Chinese society.
Research interests include: medical and psychological anthropology, political cosmologies, post-socialism, colonialism, and East Asian studies. She explores themes like mediumship, toxicity, and sensory experiences of the unseen across religious communities in China.
Ng’s publications span topics from plastic pollution’s social impact to the intersection of psychosis and political discourse in Shanghai. She collaborates internationally, contributing to interdisciplinary studies on global spirituality and cognitive anthropology.
