Victoria Leigh Brown, PhD

Education

Ph.D., Binghamton University, State University of New York, 2021
M.A., Binghamton University, State University of New York, 2014
B.A., Indiana University, Indianapolis, 2010

Research

Dr. Brown is a medical anthropologist with wide-ranging research interests in: women’s health and well-being; public health; global political economy; work/labor; social studies of science, technology, and medicine; uro/gynecology; the politics of reproduction; agroindustrial and rural development in southern Europe; and the social determinants of health in the rural US. 

Her interdisciplinary research examines historical, institutional, and economic processes through which precarity and violence are produced, experienced, and lived. A central theme throughout her work is women’s livelihood and the devaluation of women’s contributions in both productive (waged work) and reproductive (biological and domestic) spheres. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, she is interested in the meaning and experience of health and illness, as well as the political and economic processes that structure the distribution of human disease and disorders. She has spent the past decade examining the social costs of industrial greenhouse agriculture in southeastern Spain, the origin point for one of Europe’s largest counter-seasonal horticultural supply chains. Investigating working-class Spanish and transnational migrant women farmworkers’ experiences with economic precarity, Dr. Brown’s research elucidates the way globalized food systems, changing rural physical and political environments, toxic exposure, and austerity impact the bodies, health, and livelihood of rural women workers. 

Her research also seeks to challenge the conflation of “women’s health” with biological reproduction by examining often-overlooked aspects of chronic illness and is currently carrying out projects on: the patient-provider encounter, provider “belief” and chronic pelvic pain, social determinants of menstrual health and hygiene in rural Missouri, breast cancer survivorship, and how women manage uro/gynecologic conditions in the workplace. Dr. Brown’s research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health/NIDDK T32 in Clinical Outcomes Research Training Program in Female Lower Urinary Tract Disorders (2022-); the American Association of University Women (2019-20); the National Collegiate Cancer Foundation (2019); Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture, and Sport (2015-16); the Binghamton University Council (2019-20); Foundation (2019 & 2020); Graduate School (2019 & 2020); and Department of Anthropology (2012-20); and Skidmore College’s Department of International Affairs (2021-22).