Martha Lincoln

Martha Lincoln is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at San Francisco State University (SFSU), specializing in medical and cultural anthropology. She holds a Ph.D. from the CUNY Graduate Center and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley’s Prevention Research Center. Her research focuses on the cultural politics of public health, biopolitics, and political economic impacts on healthcare systems, with extensive fieldwork in Vietnam since 2008. Key projects include studies on Vietnam’s healthcare stratification, urban cholera outbreaks, and alcohol use cultures, culminating in her 2021 book Epidemic Politics in Contemporary Vietnam.

Her current U.S.-based research examines affective economies in medical crowdfunding for cancer, supported by the Marcus Award and NSF funding. Lincoln contributes frequently to public discourse on pandemics, publishing opinion pieces in Nature, The Atlantic, and CNN, and has been featured in national/international media like BBC and New York Times. She co-edits the Journal of Vietnamese Studies and advises M.A. students pursuing cultural/medical anthropology.

Lincoln teaches courses including Medical Anthropology, STEM and Social Justice, and The Craft of Anthropological Writing. Her scholarly awards include the Marcus Early Career Research Award (2021) and NSF Scholars Award (2022). She advocates for public health memorialization and critiques U.S. pandemic response policies in high-impact essays.