Scholarship and Biography
Sarah Lamb, Professor of Anthropology and Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences, is a cultural anthropologist who studies the ways people construct their social-cultural worlds and identities, particularly surrounding age, gender, the body, family, religion, and nation. She critically investigates everyday life practices and experiences, medical and legal discourses, and taken-for-granted assumptions, as a means to understand both how social-cultural worlds are made, and the nature of the particular forms of aging and gender (body, nation, etc.) that people believe in. After undergraduate training in religious studies at Brown University and graduate training in anthropology at the University of Chicago, she became a postdoctoral fellow in medical anthropology and sociocultural gerontology at the University of California-San Francisco. Her primary ethnographic research has been carried out in West Bengal, India and among Indian immigrants as well as older white Americans in the San Francisco, Boston, and Bible Belt areas of the United States.
Lamb’s books include White Saris and Sweet Mangoes: Aging, Gender, and Body in India (U of California Press 2000), Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad (Indiana U Press 2009), Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility (U of California Press 2022), and (as co-editor with Diane Mines) Everyday Life in South Asia (1st and 2nd editions). Lamb is also the editor of the Rutgers University Press book series Global Perspectives on Aging. Lamb's current research examines “successful aging" as a contemporary obsession and cultural-biopolitical project, prevailing in North America and with diverse instantiations around the globe. Her edited volume Successful Aging as a Contemporary Obsession: Global Perspectives was published by Rutgers University Press in 2017; and she is currently extending this project for her next book in process, Successful Aging’s Global Moment: Visions and Dilemmas of Aging Well.
Lamb is the recipient of several major grants and awards, including a 2019 to 2023 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship. In 2022, she was selected to deliver the 58th Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, a distinguished lecture held annually by the Department of Anthropology at the University of Rochester.
Dr. Lamb teaches a range of courses, including Contemporary Anthropological Theory, Anthropology of Gender, Aging in Cross-Cultural Perspective, South Asian Cultures and Societies, Anthropology of the Body, Medicine, Body and Culture, Introduction to the Comparative Study of Human Societies, and Advanced Ethnographic Research Methods. A firm believer in interdisciplinary approaches, Dr. Lamb is a member of the Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department and the programs in South Asian Studies and Health: Science, Society, and Policy. She is also a member of Brandeis's Lifespan Initiative on Healthy Aging.