Sanaullah Khan, Ph.D.

Sanaullah Khan, Ph.D.

Title: Assistant Professor
Research Specialty: Medical Anthropology
Dept/Program: Anthropology
Office: Olin 245
Email: skhan@uakron.edu

Biography

Sanaullah Khan is a medical anthropologist with an interest in studying diagnostic uncertainty and suspicion toward illness and injury in a diverse range of settings including households, digital platforms, state and medical institutions. He is interested in using ethnographic, archival and digital sources for his work across professional medicine and folk practices in colonial and post-colonial South Asia (especially Pakistan), United States and beyond. In his research and teaching, he is interested in investigating diverse notions of medical efficacy as well as varying epistemologies of illness and health in globalized, displaced and securitized settings, where social actors compete over treatments and diagnosis as signs of care, neglect and abuse. He is currently working on a book project titled War Medicine: Military, Family Life and the Diagnosis of Loyalty in which he explores the disciplining and concealment of combat trauma in militarized Pakistan. He is also exploring new areas of investigation related to the usefulness of uncertainty in global health, new medical technologies, placebos and the question of pharmaceutical efficacy in complementary medicine through interdisciplinary approaches including social theorization, archival work, ethnography and the analysis of digital content. While being a medical anthropologist, Sanaullah aspires to be an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections between anthropology, sociology, bioethics, politics, religion, history and public health.

Research

Public Scholarship

Khan, Sanaullah (2023) Carceral Recovery: Prisons, Drug Markets, and the New Pharmaceutical Self (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666929096/Carceral-Recovery-Prisons-Drug-Markets-and-the-New-Pharmaceutical-Self

 

Edited Volume

Khan, Sanaullah Khan & Schwebach, Elliott (2023) Global Histories of Trauma: Globalization, Displacement and Mental Illness. Co-edited with Elliot Schwebach, Routledge Press. https://www.routledge.com/Globalization-Displacement-and-Psychiatry-Global-Histories-of-Trauma/Khan-Schwebach/p/book/9781032275550

Publications

  • Khan, S. (2024). Chronicity and COVID-19: Kinship, Illness and the State in Pakistan. Society and Culture in South Asia, 10(1), 48-72. https://doi.org/10.1177/23938617231191593
  • Khan, S. (2023). Complimentary Addictions: Pharmaceutical Experimentalism and the Problem of Recovery in Baltimore. Medical Anthropology, 42(7), 637–649. https://doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2023.2249203 
  • Khan, Sanaullah. 2023. Taming the nafs: Unbounded spirits and mental illness in militarized Pakistan. Ethos 51: 401–415. https://doi.org/10.1111/etho.12407
  • Khan, S. (2023). Leaving Comrades to Die: Shahadat, Soldiering and Accidental Death on the Siachen Glacier. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 46(2), 407–424. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2180897
  • Khan, S. (2023). Making kinship away from home: chronic disease and the Pakistani diaspora in the US. Asian Anthropology, 22(1), 59–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2022.2161121
  • Khan, S. (2023). Heights of madness: diagnosis, suspicion & military discipline on the Siachen glacier. Critical Military Studies, 9(4), 601–618 https://doi.org/10.1080/23337486.2023.2170529
  • Khan, S. (2022). Medicine and the critique of war: military psychiatry, social classification and the malingering patient in colonial India. Medical History, 66(1), 47–63. https://doi.org/10.1017/mdh.2021.38

 

Education

  • Ph.D. Cultural Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, United States
  • M.A. Cultural Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, United States
  • B.A. Political Science, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan