Rate My Professor Rebecca Howes-Mischel

Rebecca Howes-Mischel is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at James Madison University. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from New York University, where her dissertation, "Gestating Subjects: Negotiating Public Health and Pregnancy in Transborder Oaxaca," examined reproductive politics in Mexico and the Oaxacan diaspora in Southern California. Her research centers on medical anthropology, with a focus on the gendered contexts of human microbiome research. This involves interviewing scientists and birth workers and analyzing academic and popular narratives about microbiome applications in reproductive health. She has conducted fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico, investigating indigenous women's reproductive lives amid local, national, and global public health initiatives, including rural clinics, activist seminars, and community education campaigns.

Howes-Mischel co-directs the Gender and Science Ethnography Lab at James Madison University with Dr. Megan Tracy, exploring cross-species microbiomes and their gendered implications in reproductive health, dairy science, and collaborations among universities, national programs, and venture capital. She serves as advisor for the Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies minor and is affiliated with Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her scholarship appears in leading journals and volumes, including "With this you can meet your baby: Fetal personhood and audible heartbeats in Oaxacan public health" (Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2016); "The 'Sound' of Life, or, How Should We Hear a Fetal 'Voice'?" (Anthropology of the Fetus: Biology, Culture, and Society, 2017); "Gender, Microbial Relations, and the Fermentation of Food" with Megan Tracy (Cuizine, 2018); "Maternal microbis: How kinship composes reproductive relations for a human-bovine maternal microbiome" with Megan Tracy (Feminist Anthropology, 2023); "Humanizing big numbers: Representational strategies in institutional films about global maternal mortality" (Visual Anthropology Review, 2017); and "Interembodiment beyond kin: Leveraging partibility within microbial FemTech" with Megan Tracy (Social Science & Medicine, 2025). Additional contributions include chapters in Risk, Reproduction, and Narratives of Experience (2012) and Bearing the Weight of the World: Exploring Maternal Embodiment (2018), as well as "Stocking up on Fish Mox: a systematic analysis of cultural narratives about self-medicating in online forums" (AIMS Public Health, 2017) and "Teaching Reproductive Politics and Intersectional Empathy through Ethnographic Case Studies" (Feminist Pedagogy, 2023).