Dalla Lana School of Public Health

Faculty Member

Kristin Bright PhD, University of California Santa Cruz

Kristin Bright is associate professor of cultural and medical anthropology at Middlebury College in Vermont (US) and holds graduate faculty positions in social and behavioural health at the University of Toronto Dalla Lana School of Public Health and sociocultural anthropology at Carleton University (Canada).

In Vermont and Canada, she leads the Body Online lab, a student-faculty collaborative for graduate and undergraduate interdisciplinary research on youth health, cancer treatment, relational and sexual health, holistic and integrative medicine, digital ecosystems, and end of life care. Across these areas, Bright’s lab is interested in the diverse ways people imagine and interact with emerging practices of health communication and activism.

After finishing her PhD in 1998 at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bright completed postdoctoral work in medical humanities at UC Irvine and Stanford (1999-2002). She then carried out NIH funded postdoc work at UC Berkeley on young adult substance use and mental health. She has directed large multi-site studies including a sociocultural/clinical study of advanced breast cancer in Egypt, India, Mexico, South Africa, and the US, and a large policy study on access to novel therapeutics for lethal cancers in Canada and the US.

Current research: In 2024-26, Bright is leading the grant-funded program Seeding the Medical Humanities: Fostering Collaborations in Community and Relational Wellbeing, with Roxanna Alvarado, Elio Farley, Hanna Medwar, and Emily Stone (Middlebury); Jessica Bytautas and Jayanti Singh (UofT); and community partners in Aotearoa, Canada, Denmark, and US. Fieldwork takes place across three topics: student-led pedagogies for relational and sexual health education and anti-violence; cancer patient advocacy and stories of recognition in the shadow of digital health and AI; and therapeutic landscapes of familial and household medicine. In a second project, Bright and her students have been working with clinicians and educators at Mount Abe Unified School District and Mountain Community Health (rural central Vermont) on the implementation evaluation of a school based health center. In a third area, Bright is working with Jessica Bytautas, who recently finished her PhD at DLSPH, and DLSPH faculty Pia Kontos and Blake Poland on meanings of legacy and materiality at end of life; as well as with Anneliese Mills (MA ’19, MD ’21) and colleagues at Sunnybrook Health Sciences on social organizational relationships of medical assistance in dying; and with Watson fellow Sam Gordan-Wexler ‘23.5 on what it means to die well.

Advising and teaching: please reach out via email for any advising inquiries. Dr. Bright is open to co-supervise or act as a committee member for MA and PhD students. Please note that advising involvement must also be approved in conjunction with the graduate unit’s office, along with the other members of the supervisory committee.

Prospective areas for graduate advising: social behavioural health, medical anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), feminist health humanities, ontologies of chronic illness and disability, medicine and colonialism, patient advocacy movements, politics of labour and recognition, structural inequalities in cancer treatment and drug access, structural and institutional determinants of care, digital health activism, youth-led pedagogies of health education, 2SLGBTQI+ youth health thriving, therapeutic landscapes, decolonizing medicine and medical history, decentering euro ontologies and theory, participatory methods, ethnographic methods, Delphi research models, critical theory (biopolitics, affect, infrastructure, somatosphere, human nonhuman relations, queer theory, kinship, new materialisms, anthropocene); South Asia, North America, and the Pacific.