Welcome to Dr Lys Alcayna-Stevens

The School is delighted to welcome Dr Lys Alcayna-Stevens to the team. She joins the team as the new Associate Professor in Medical and Biological Anthropology. She will begin on 1 September 2023 and be affiliated with St Catherine's College.

My research centres on questions of the body, violence, and inequality, as they relate to epidemic and environmental interventions in the Global South, with a focus on central Africa, and extensive ethnographic research in rural Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). My first research project examined the politics and practice of environmentalism and scientific field research with wild great apes in the Mai Ndombe region of DRC, engaging with feminist scholars of science and the body, and feminist geographers of environmental crisis. My second project has examined human-animal relations surrounding zoonotic disease, and the social, affective, and economic aftermaths of epidemics – and epidemic response – on rural communities in the Equateur and Tshuapa regions of DRC. I am currently working on a third project which examines the embodied and affective dimensions of environmental exploitation in central Africa, and brings anthropological theory into dialogue with ‘degrowth’ and ‘postgrowth’ scholarship.

Lys Alcayna-Stevens is a medical anthropologist whose research is situated at the intersection of political ecology, multispecies ethnography and science and technology studies. Her current work focuses on local political economies of epidemic disease in rural Democratic Republic of Congo. She completed her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2017. She was a Fyssen Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institut Pasteur and the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale (Collège de France) in Paris from 2016-18, and a Marie-Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at KU Leuven from 2022-23. She has also been a lecturer at the New School for Social Research in New York, and a Research Fellow in the Anthropology Department of Harvard University, working on projects in collaboration with interdisciplinary teams of researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg.