Rate My Professor Carlo Caduff

Carlo Caduff is Professor in Anthropology and Head of the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London, where he also serves as Director of Research and Chair of the Culture, Medicine & Power Research Group. He received his PhD in Social Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009 and has been teaching at King’s since 2012. Caduff’s research specializes in the sociocultural anthropology of medicine, science, experts, crisis, risk, media, and the state, with a focus on social theory, research methods, and ethnography in the United States and South Asia. He has been the principal investigator of major ethnographic projects, including one on pandemic preparedness in the United States, resulting in his book The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger published by the University of California Press in 2015 (with a German translation by Konstanz University Press), and another on cancer care in India. His publications appear in journals across social sciences such as Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Anthropological Theory, and BioSocieties; medical sciences including The Lancet, The Lancet Oncology, Global Public Health, The Journal of Global Oncology, The Journal of Cancer Policy, and Nature Reviews Cancer; and humanities such as Critical Inquiry.

Caduff has edited three journal special issues, including one on new media publics in Current Anthropology. Key publications include “What Went Wrong: Corona and the World after the Full Stop” (Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2020), “Pandemic Prophecy, or How to Have Faith in Reason” (Current Anthropology, 2014), “On the Verge of Death: Visions of Biological Vulnerability” (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2014), “Women, Power, and Cancer: A Lancet Commission” (The Lancet, 2023), and “Re-imagining Global Health through Social Medicine” (Global Public Health, 2019). His current project, based in India’s largest public cancer hospital, examines how patients and families access cancer care amid rising disease rates, lack of universal health coverage, fragmented health systems, and health inequalities, with a focus on affordability. This work is funded by a five-year Wellcome Trust Investigator Award. Additional grants as principal investigator include Wellcome Trust funding for Grid Oncology: Remaking Cancer Care in India (2019–2025) and Living with Heat: Medical, Social and Cultural Contexts of Excess Heat in India (2024–2029), as well as British Academy funding for Amplifying the Communicative Power of Public Health Researchers in Tanzania (2024).