Sophie Day

Biography

Professor Sophie Day studied at Cambridge University, Stanford University, Ca., and the London School of Economic and Political Sciences, where she completed a PhD on spirit possession in Ladakh, North India. She holds an honorary chair at Imperial College, London in the School of Public Health, where she is currently seconded half time. She was awarded the Eileen Basker Prize and the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems for her 2007 monograph, 'On the Game: Women and Sex Work'. London: Pluto Press. Professor Day is conducting research in the Patient Experience Research Centre that she established with Professor Helen Ward at Imperial College London, and continues to work on projects concerning Ladakh and emerging from her collaboration in the UK on the cultural life of numbers and data, and in the Centre of the Body, Goldsmiths. She teaches the anthropology of health both to Imperial and Goldsmiths students.

Research Interest

Professor Sophie Day is currently working on concepts and relations of care in the NHS and on translational research (supported by the Imperial NIHR Biomedical Research Centre & the Imperial College Healthcare Charity). She has also been engaged in documenting, digitalizing and returning images from her 1980s fieldwork to Ladakh, North India (with Dr Leizaola, supported by the British Academy), and compiling biographies of houses. She has recently completed a collaborative project (with Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford, Sociology) supported by Intel Research on new numeracies. Earlier in the 2000s, she completed a restudy of sex work in London (supported by the Wellcome Trust), and a European project on HIV prevention among prostitutes (supported by the European Commission). Within the anthropology of health, she has worked on sexual & occupational health, idioms of care, patient journeys and pathways, new technologies and spirit possession as well as the ethical and political lives of institutions.