Nina Kammerer

Nina (Cornelia) Kammerer, an anthropologist and public health researcher, is a faculty member in the Heller PhD Program, in which she teaches qualitative research methods. She has taught in Brandeis University's Department of Anthropology, in which she introduced a course on AIDS in the early 1990s. Ms. Kammerer has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork among Tibeto-Burman-speaking Akha of Northern Thailand. In 1993, she served as Principal Investigator on a study, funded by the American Foundation for AIDS Research, of sociocultural risk and protective factors for HIV/AIDS among four highland minorities in Thailand. To strengthen her knowledge of epidemiology and biostatistics, Ms. Kammerer obtained a master's degree from Boston University School of Public Health in 1997. From 1997 to 2004, she was a Senior Researcher at Health and Addictions Research, Inc., a Boston-based research, evaluation, and quality improvement consulting firm that specialized in behavioral health. She has published articles and book chapters on asymmetric marriage alliance, Christian conversion, ethnic identity, and Thai government policies towards highland minorities. With Nicola Tannenbaum, she co-edited two volumes on religion published in the Yale University Southeast Asian Studies monograph series. In addition to publications on HIV/AIDS in Thailand, she has co-authored two book chapters on HIV/AIDS risk, prevention, and care among transgender people in the United States. A co-authored 2006 resource paper on trauma and retraumatization was part of the After the Crisis Initiative: Healing from Trauma after Disasters of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's Center for Mental Health Services. Since 2010, when not teaching at Brandeis, Ms. Kammerer is a Visiting Investigator at the Catalan Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (Institut Català de Recerca en Patrimoni Cultural) in Girona, Catalonia, Spain, where she conducts field research on continuities and transformations in the Catalan culture of festa, including intersections with the movement in Catalonia for independence from Spain, topics explored in a 2014 article and a book manuscript in process.