Janelle Lamoreaux

I am an interdisciplinary scholar and Associate Professor of Anthropology who has worked at University of Arizona since 2016, after completing a postdoctoral position at University of Cambridge with the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (2024-2026) and a PhD in Medical Anthropology in UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco’s joint program (2023). My approach combines feminist science studies with medical anthropology and environmental humanities to consider pressing issues of reproductive health, toxic exposure, and the intersections of science and politics, especially in settings under various forms and degrees of authoritarian governance.

My first single-authored book, Infertile Environments, 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 have also participated 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 intergenerational 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). Finally, my article, "Beyond the Egg and the Sperm: How Science has Revised a Romance through Reproductomics," in Science, Technology and Human Values touches on question of postgenomics, as does a forthcoming chapter in the Cambridge Handbook of Anthropology of the Body.

I am currently conducting research for my next book, Co-opting Toxicity. The project is a study of how epigenetic imaginaries - or persuasive discourse about how environmental exposures influence reproductive, development and intergenerational health - are being used by far-right populist health movements in the U.S. In the book I describe how concerns about the harms of toxic exposure are being co-opted by the far-right through public health (Make America Healthy Again) campaigns and conservative environmentalism. The book covers topics of anti-vaccination, anti-abortion and anti-exposure to discuss how fears of epigenetic transformation in far-right populism further fantasies of return to genetic, bodily, and racial purity through practices aimed at going back to nature and to the people’s knowledge.

In addition, I am finalizing collaborative publications related to a three-year study (2022-2025) of reproductive reluctance and fertility rate decline at a moment of climate change, conducted with Gen Z students and research participants. The study builds on my work with Katharine Dow -- in particular a book review essay on reproductive environmental justice entitled "Situating Kinmaking and the Population 'Problem'" , published in Environmental Humanities – that led me to questions about how fears of overpopulation operate through similar rationales as those surrounding underpopulation. Student researchers and I are currently writing up our interview-based findings on 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 U.S. We also address how eugenic, heteronormative frameworks underpin much of the discourse surrounding fertility rate decline, while ignoring the continued withdrawal of support systems from people during pre- and post- partum within in the U.S. I have published two op/eds on the issue: one in the New York Times and the other in the Arizona Daily Star. 

I enjoy writing and have been asked to contribute to compilations that weave personal narrative into the academic genre, including a short piece called Reservoirs of Endangerment which considers the use of "Arks" in the cryoconservation of gametes, and how reservoirs, including a lake I regularly visited with my family growing up in rural Washington State, are both built and destroyed in the name of biodiversity and species survival. I have led writing retreats, writing groups and writing workshops for social scientists and humanities scholars at various levels and continue to do so as time allows.

As a teacher and mentor, I focus on topics of social theory, qualitative methods, reproduction and the environment. I have also taught introductory cultural anthropology and sociology courses. I am a certified mentor through the Mentor Institute and through training in Inclusive Mentoring for Undergraduate Students. I am currently accepting graduate students interested in working on projects at the intersection of reproduction and the environment (both broadly defined), or other issues that engage a feminist science studies approach. If you are interested in applying to our program please email me a short description of your anticipated PhD project as well as a copy of your CV. I do not have the capacity to reply to every query but will do my best to respond, especially if you are a strong fit with our program’s strengths. Often whether you are successful in your application has less to do with your qualifications than with your fit in among our small sociocultural faculty. My current PhD students include:

Rinku Ashok-Kumar: Making of the Indian Microbiome (anticipated graduation 2027)

Sophie Kenyon: Crafting Queer Kin through Permanent Contraception and Childfree Futures (anticipated graduation 2028)

Patrick Robinson (co-advisor with Dr. Stefanie Graeter): Paraecology in Practice (anticipated graduation 2029) 

I am on research leave fall semester 2026. I will return in January 2027 and will be teaching ANTH 608B Anthropological Theory in the spring semester.

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