Jennifer S. Hirsch
Jennifer S. Hirsch is a professor of sociomedical sciences at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Working at the intersection of social science and public health, Hirsch's research examines gender, sexuality, and migration; the anthropology of love; social dimensions of HIV; and sexual- and gender-based violence. She is the coauthor, with Shamus Khan, of Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus (W. W. Norton, 2020), named an NPR book of the year.
At Radcliffe, Hirsch is writing a book about social, cultural, and institutional constraints on marital, sexual, and reproductive self-determination among Orthodox Jews, drawing on research conducted in 2023–2024.
A 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2014–2015 Columbia Public Voices Fellow, and a 2018–2019 visiting research scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Health and Wellbeing, Hirsch earned an AB in history with a certificate in women’s studies from Princeton University and a PhD in population dynamics and anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Her publications include A Courtship after Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families (University of California Press, 2003), The Secret: Love, Marriage, and HIV (Vanderbilt University Press, 2010), two coedited volumes on the anthropology of love, more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, and numerous op-eds in such venues as Time and the Washington Post. New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray highlighted Hirsch’s work in her 2017 #16Days social campaign, and in 2023, Hirsch received the Society for Medical Anthropology’s Carole H. Browner Graduate Student Mentorship Award.
