Dr. Matthew Thomann is a cultural and critical medical anthropologist with expertise in the anthropology of global health, queer anthropology, citizenship and belonging, and violence and marginalization in sub-Saharan African and U.S. urban contexts. Since 2010, he has conducted community-engaged research focused on sexuality and the politics of health in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and the United States, making key interventions in medical anthropology, public health, and queer anthropology

Broadly, Dr. Thomann’s program of research interrogates the forms of exclusion that produce increased health burdens for sexual and gender minority communities, while queering the lenses through which we understand the implications of public health interventions designed to address such disparities. His ethnographic research illustrates how public health science and practice – including their accompanying metrics, categories, and ways of knowing – produce newly embodied ways of being among communities disproportionately affected by HIV and other health vulnerabilities while often obscuring the complex social structures that shape the disparities they seek to resolve.

The overarching objective of Dr. Thomann’s research is to produce academically rigorous scholarship of anthropological and public health significance in collaboration with marginalized communities pursuing health justice, while simultaneously complicating unquestioned public health narratives that flatten sexual and gender minority experience and reinscribe existing forms of exclusion. Specifically, his program of research is guided by the primary objective of exploring the structural drivers of health outcomes among queer communities, including gay men, transgender individuals, and other non-normative sexual and gendered subjects while applying ethnographic methods to interrogate the intervention logics designed to meet their needs. His research combines the granularity of ethnography with mixed methods approaches honed through training in public health and implementation science.

Dr. Thomann’s research has been supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the West African Research Association, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the US Fulbright Scholar Award, among others. He has consulted on interdisciplinary, mixed-methods research projects with the Centre for Global Public Health at the University of Manitoba, MPact Global Action for Gay Men’s Health and Rights (formerly MSMGF), and the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Well-Being (ISGMH) at Northwestern University.

In his teaching, Dr. Thomann provides rigorous training and mentoring in medical anthropology for a diverse set of undergraduate and graduate students, centering a “critically applied praxis” that balances skills-based learning with community engagement and collaborative knowledge production. In addition to a graduate seminar in Applied Anthropology, Dr. Thomann teaches topical courses including Queer Anthropology and Critical Global Health. He views classroom instruction – whether in undergraduate core courses or graduate seminars – as an opportunity to center epistemic justice, including through the perspectives of marginalized voices in the academy. For example, the anthropological training he offers students queers the disciplinary canon by centering queer of color critique and other perspectives from within the academy and beyond.

Dr. Thomann received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from American University (2014), his M.S. in Teaching from Pace University (2009), and his B.A. in Anthropology and French, from DePaul University (2007). 

Dr. Thomann’s Google Scholar page can be found here.