Janelle Lamoreaux

I am a sociocultural anthropologist focused on reproduction, gender and environmental health. My approach combines social studies of science with medical anthropology and environmental humanities.

My first single-authored book, In/fertile Environments: epigenetic toxicology and the reproductive health of Chinese Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2023. The book explores how reproductive and developmental toxicologists in China imagine and materialize various environments through epigenetic research. Across five chapters -- which discuss the national, hormonal, dietary, maternal and laboratory environments -- I discuss how scientists and activists make sense of the increasingly toxic worlds in which they live. Based on fieldwork conducted in Nanjing during a time when environmental protection was often not explicitly in everyday concerns, but when the amount of toxic exposures faced by people in China was clearly growing, my research approaches epigenetic toxicology as lens through which scientists and others make sense of the embodied and potentially inheritable consequences of political-economic policies and distributed social hierarchies.

In addition to the book, I have published related peer-reviewed articles in Cultural Anthropology about variations in epigenetic understanding of personhood and the "maternal environment," in Cross Currents about the harm of endocrine disrupting chemicals can move beyond individualized human and non-human bodies, and in Medical Anthropology Quarterly on the increase of attention toward the intergenerational effects of toxic exposure or "Passing Down Pollution". I have also contributed to various online forums, including Somatosphere, Fieldsights, and this CA author interview. A short, personal essay on gender and toxicity is published in Environmental History as part of a forum called "Of Perpetrators and Victims."

I am also a participant in the Wellcome Trust funded Biosocial Birth Cohort Research Network (BBCR), which examines and utilizes birth cohort studies as reflexive method, and have worked Dr. Sahra Gibbon, on questions of integernational ethnography. I published an essay on this topic at Somatosphere, and co-edited a special issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly, called Towards Intergenerational Ethnography (2021).

My next two projects continues to think about environmentally-influenced reproduction in two different ways.

Collaborative research with Katharine Dow at University of Cambridge -- in particular a book review essay on reproductive environmental justice entitled "Situating Kinmaking and the Population 'Problem'" and published in Environmental Humanities -- led me to questions about how fears of overpopulation are funneled through similar rationales as those surrounding underpopulation. I have now founded the Collaborative Anthropology of Reproduction and the Environment (CARE) Lab at the University of Arizona to further explore this issue, and study how and why underpopulation or "fertiity rate decline" becomes a problem for whom. Students and visiting scholars working in the lab are currently researching how young adults living in Arizona think about reproductive decision making at a moment of increasing restrictions on reproductive rights, and urgent concern about the political, economic and ecological future of the USA. In addition, I am studying how eugenic, heteronormative frameworks underpin much of the discourse surrounding fertility rate decline, while ignoring the continued withdrawel of support systems from people during pre- and post- partum within in the US, as well as the conditions or environments that influence imaginaries of the country's future. I have published two op/eds on the issue: one in the New York Times and the other in the Arizona Daily Star. Those interested in learning more about this research or becoming involved with the CARE Lab can email me directly for further information.

In addition to this collaborative project, I am working on another solo-research project about ideas of endangerment/extinction and extraplanetary reproduction. In particular I am interested in "cryoconservation" initiatives - or conservation efforts that primarily depend on technologies of cryopreservation. I am thinking through how the global rise of -omic understandings of egg and sperm as beings-in-relation seem to be contradicted by apocalyptic scientific imaginaries which interpret "life itself" as the future savior. My article, "Beyond the Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Revised a Romance through Reproductomics," in Science, Technology and Human Values touches on some of these issues. A short piece about Resevoirs of Endangerment further considers the use of "Arks" in the cryoconservation of gametes, and how resevoirs are both built and destroyed in the name of biodiversity and species survival.

In academic year 2025-26, I am serving as Interim Director of the School of Anthropology and will not be teaching courses as usual. I plan to return to the classroom in Spring 2027.

2025 Sperm as Sentinel. In Seminal: On Sperm, Health and Politics. New York University Press.

2024 Reservoirs of Endangerment. History and Technology 40(4), 356-365.

2023 Infertile Environments: Epigenetic Toxicology and the Reproductive Health of Chinese Men. Duke University Press.

2023 The Case of the Ugly Sperm. In The Ethnographic Case. Mattering Press.

2022 Beyond the Egg and the Sperm?: How Science Has Revised a Romance through Reproductomics. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 47(6), 1180–1204.

2022 Sperm. With Ayo Wahlberg. In An Anthropogenic Table of Elements, 158-167. University of Toronto Press.

2021  “Passing Down Pollution”: (Inter)generational toxicology and (epi)genetic environmental health. Special Issue, Towards Intergenerational Ethnography: Kinship, Cohorts and Environments in and beyond the (bio)social sciences. Sahra Gibbon and Janelle Lamoreaux, eds. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35(4): 529-546

2021 Towards Intergenerational Ethnography: Kinship, Cohorts and Environments in and Beyond the Biosocial Sciences. Sahra Gibbon and Janelle Lamoreaux (eds). Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35(4): 423-440.

2021 "Reproducing Toxicity." Environmental History 26(2). Forum on "Toxins in Environmental History".

2020 "Situated Kinmaking and the Population 'Problem'" Environmental Humanities 12(2) https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/12/2/475/167000

2020. "Toxicology and the Chemistry of Cohort Kinship," Somatosphere, http://somatosphere.net/2020/chemical-kinship.html/

2019. "Epigenetic In/Fertilities." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, April 25. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/epigenetic-in-fertilities

2019. "'Swimming in Poison': Reimagining Endocrine Disruption through China’s Environmental Hormones." Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (e-journal) 30: 78–100. https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-30/lamoreaux.

2018 Gendered Bioeconomies. (Links to an Accepted Manuscript of the book chapter which appears in Handbook of Genomics, Health and Society published by Routledge, available online: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Genomics-Health-and-Society-2nd-Edition/Gibbon-Prainsack-Hilgartner-Lamoreaux/p/book/9781315451695

2016 "What if the Environment is a Person? Lineages of Epigenetics in a Toxic China," Cultural Anthropology 31(2): 188-214, https://culanth.org/articles/806-what-if-the-environment-is-a-person-lineages-of

2016 It's Artificial, naturally! Shielding the breast in an era of climate change. Reproductive Sociology Research Group Blog. University of Cambridge. http://www.reprosoc.com/blog/2016/12/2/its-artificial-naturally-shielding-the-breast-in-an-era-of-climate-change

2016 Lust. Money. Impotence: A Review of the book The Impotence Epidemic: Men’s Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China. Current Anthropology 57(1).

2015 Making a Case for Reducing Pollution in China, or The Case of the Ugly Sperm. Ethnographic Case Series. Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2015/10/making-a-case-for-reducing-pollution-in-china-or-the-case-of-the-ugly-sperm.html

2015 Book Review: Powerless Science? Science and Politics in a Toxic World. Medicine Anthropology Theory 1(1) http://www.medanthrotheory.org/read/3929/powerless-science-science-and-politics-in-a-toxic-world