Jessica Ham

Jessica Ham is an anthropologist addressing the relationship between environments and bodies.

Born and raised in rural Missouri, she began her career in higher education with degrees in English and anthropology from the University of Missouri-Columbia (2003).  Following work advocating for quality health care access, she earned an MA in social anthropology from the University of Sussex in the UK (2007).  She spent the next two years working with the local food systems movement in post-Katrina New Orleans. In 2009 Ham pursued a PhD in anthropology at the University of Georgia and in 2016 she successfully defended her dissertation, an empirical investigation of the causes and consequences of food insecurity in Ghana. Between 2016 and 2018 she was a Post-Doctoral Research Associate with the Global Health Program at Princeton University.  In 2018 she joined the faculty of Oxford College.

Students in Ham’s courses engage with and fuse critical social theory and diverse methodologies to develop an integrative analytical skillset.  She guides students in assessing how different kinds of evidence are necessary to illuminate the intersecting social, political and biological realities that structure the human experience. As a professor invested in shaping ideas and actions that bring equitable and sustained change to the world, she forefronts the challenges of the 21^st century as a means to explore bio-cultural diversity in past and present.  This gently nudges students into questioning what they consider to be “normal” and why as they contemplate their roles as architects of and actors in the future.  Whether an anthropology major or anthropologically curious, students walk away from her classroom with critical thinking skills and research techniques that are applicable to their engaged citizenship and professional lives. 

An active member of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology, Ham is a routine participant in national conferences and integrated into a wide range of scholarly and activist networks.