Megan Carney is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Regional Food Studies at the University of Arizona. She is a feminist ethnographer specializing in medical and sociocultural anthropology with active community-based collaborative research projects in the United States and in southern Europe/central Mediterranean (primarily Sicily). Her primary research and teaching interests include critical migration and diaspora studies, critical food studies, health equity and social inequality, the food-climate-migration nexus, the politics of care and social solidarity, and feminist methodology and pedagogy. She is the author of two critically-acclaimed books, The Unending Hunger: Tracing Women and Food Insecurity Across Borders (2015, University of California Press) which was awarded Outstanding Academic Title by CHOICE and selected as a “California Book-to-Action”, and Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean (2021, University of California Press). Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Schuman European Union Public Affairs Program, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Institute for Mexico and the United States (UC-MEXUS), the Agnese Nelms Haury Foundation, the Udall Center for Public Policy, and USDA, among others. She was a Public Voices Fellow (2018-2019) with The OpEd Project and regularly publishes across a variety of media outlets, including in The Hill, The Conversation, Civil Eats, Latino Rebels, Inside Higher Ed, Scientific American, Sapiens, and Arizona Daily Star. Dr. Carney received her PhD and MA in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and her BA in Anthropology and Italian from UCLA.
Dr. Carney has worked with African diasporic communities in both southern Europe and the Western United States around issues related to migration, displacement, dispossession, and health. Her courses "Bodies and Medicine", "Anthropology of Food", "Food and Migration", "Mediterranean Migrations," and "Feminist Medical Anthropology Lab" all foreground Black feminist theory, Black Geographies, and African diaspora studies.
Read more about Dr. Carney’s work on her Anthropology faculty page.