Ugo Edu

Email: uedu@ucla.edu

Office Hours:

By Appointment Only

Assistant Professor, Department of African American Studies

Ugo F. Edu is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies (STS). Using interdisciplinary approaches, her scholarship focuses on reproduction, race, gender, aesthetics, and body knowledge and modifications. Her book project: Beauty and the Black: Aesthetics, Race, and Sterilization in Brazil, traces the influence of an economy of race, aesthetics, and sexuality on reproductive and sterilization practices of women in Brazil. She is working on a play, Securing Ties, which draws heavily on her book project as a means for critical public engagement and an incorporation of the arts in her scholarship.

  • PhD, Medical Anthropology, University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley, 2015
  • MPH, International Health, Morehouse School of Medicine (MSM), Atlanta, Georgia, 2007
  • BS, Physiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), California, 2003
  • Edu, Ugo. (in press). When Doctors Don’t Tie: Hierarchical Medicalization, Reproduction, and Sterilization in Brazil. Medical Anthropology Quarterly.
  • Edu, Ugo. (2016). Untangling Discursive Sexualities: Afro-Brazilian Women, Sterilization and Identity Movements in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, in Human Rights, Race, and Resistance, eds. Toyin Falola and Cacee Hoyer. Routledge Press, New York.
  • Edu, Ugo. (2016). Black Bodies Matter: Black Lives Matter. Anthropology News, 57(3):18.