Faculty Member
Kristin Bright MA, PhD
- Email Address(es)
- kbright(at)middlebury.edu
- Website(s)
- Faculty bio at Middlebury College , The Body Online research lab
- Division(s)/Institute(s)
- Social & Behavioural Health Sciences Division
- Position
- Associate Professor
- SGS Status
- Associate Member
- Appointment Status
- Status Only
Kristin Bright is associate professor of cultural and medical anthropology at Middlebury College in Vermont (US) and holds graduate faculty positions in social behavioural health at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health and in anthropology at Carleton University (Canada).
In Vermont and Canada, she leads the Body Online lab, a student-faculty collaborative for graduate and undergraduate interdisciplinary research on youth health, cancer treatment, relational and sexual health, holistic and integrative medicine, digital ecosystems, and end of life care. Across these areas, Bright’s lab is interested in the diverse ways people imagine and interact with emerging practices of digital health communication and activism.
After finishing her PhD in 1998 at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bright completed postdoctoral work in medical humanities at UC Irvine and Stanford (1999-2002). She then carried out NIH funded postdoc work at UC Berkeley on young adult substance use and mental health. She has directed large multi-site studies including a sociocultural/clinical study of advanced breast cancer in Egypt, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the US, and a large policy study on access to novel therapeutics for lethal cancers in Canada and the US.
Current research: In ‘24-25, Bright is leading a grant-funded initiative in Comparative Medical Humanities: Fostering Collaborations in Community Health, with Roxanna Alvarado ‘25, Elio Farley ‘24.5, Hanna Medwar ‘25, Emily Stone ‘25, Jessica Bytautas (UofT PhD candidate), and Jayanti Singh (UofT alum ‘20), and colleagues at the University of Toronto, University of Copenhagen, and University of Auckland. Their first phase of fieldwork takes place across three topics: digital and AI shifts in cancer medications access; youth-led pedagogies of relational and sexual health education; and therapeutic landscapes of primary care. Closer to home, Bright is working on the implementation evaluation of a school-based health center at Mount Abe Union School District in collaboration with Mountain Community Health. In a third project with Jess Bytautas, she is researching sociocultural relations and expressions of legacy, life, and materiality in hospice care and medically assisted death.
Advising and teaching: Bright advises graduate and undergraduate student work in cultural and medical anthropology, gender and sexuality studies, pre-health and pre-med, IGST, South Asia, North America, and the Pacific. Areas of teaching specialty include: medical anthropology, South Asia and the diaspora, anthropologies of the body, critical science and technology (STS), anthropologies of design, therapeutic landscapes, decolonizing medicine and medical history, multimodal ethnographic research and practice, and critical theory (biopolitics, affect, infra/structure, body, human/nonhuman relations, queer theory, kinship, anthropocene).