Background

Eileen Moyer is currently a Professor in the Anthropology of Ecology, Health and Climate Change, Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her current work is preceded by more than twenty years of research on HIV/AIDS. Since the culmination of her PhD (University of Amsterdam) in 2003, she has received funding from multiple international sources to examine the myriad of ways that HIV/AIDS is entangled in human social relations in urban Africa.

Moyer is considered a leading international social science researcher in the field of HIV and sexual health and community engagement; most of her applied research has focused on improving HIV or sexual and reproductive health interventions in the global south.  With more than 80 publications to her name, she has been published in anthropological, medical, public health, health policy, urban and media studies journals. She is also the co-founder and co-editor of the open-access journal Medicine Anthropology Theory.

In October 2008, Moyer was appointed Assistant Professor of medical and urban anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and since then has worked with prominent Dutch NGOs (AIDSfonds, Rutgers, HIVOS). She was granted tenure in October 2012 and promoted to the position of Associate Professor in 2016. In 2019 she was promoted to Full Professor. Eileen Moyer also works one day a week at the Amsterdam Institute for Global Health and Development, where she is developing a focus area in Ecology, Health and Environment, while overseeing the social science arm of an applied health project focusing on improving access to HIV treatment in Tanzania.

As a University of Amsterdam professor, Moyer is beginning a research programme to study the relationship between ecological well-being, health and climate change. Her research examines the ways that climate change affects urban life, human and otherwise, as well as the relationship between climate change, environmental degradation and disease ecology. She links her work on human-viral relations to foundational questions about the entwinement of nature and culture, including anthropological concerns such as kinship, multispecies relations, evolution, human origins, and human life itself.

Since 2008, Eileen Moyer has (co-)supervised six PhD dissertations and more than 35 MA theses and BA theses to completion. She has served on 17 PhD reading committees since her departmental appointment. She received approval to promote her own PhD researchers in 2017 and currently (co-)supervises 14 PhD research projects, ten of which are expected to defend by the end of 2021.

For her PhD research Eileen Moyer did extensive anthropological fieldwork on the social worlds and health concerns of poor urban street youth in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Since, she has been involved in comparative studies of access to health care for marginalized communities, focusing on HIV-related care and treatment, and sexual and reproductive health more generally among migrant populations. These studies involve anthropological fieldwork in diverse socio-cultural settings and at multiple levels: global, national and local. Most of her research has focused on eastern Africa, but she has also worked in Haiti and China. Moyer has contributed to the development of community level participatory research methodologies and frameworks for use in applied settings and developed theoretical frameworks for analyzing the long-term societal impact of HIV on communities in high prevalence settings. She has also been involved in the training and guiding of researchers and in the comparative analysis of results from multi-sited research. 

Moyer is currently wrapping up a large collaborative research project, supported by a 5-year ERC Consolidator Grant, into the ways HIV has contributed to changing norms and practices related to gender, sexuality and public health in Kenya, South Africa and Tanzania. (http://www.becoming-men.org). Leveraging this opportunity to secure funding for additional researchers, she has formed an interdisciplinary research group around the theme of Gender, Sexuality and Health in Urban Africa. The team has more than 20 members who conduct research on HIV, sexual rights, and gender equality initiatives, attempting to understand how global influences have shaped gender and sexual norms and practices in urban Africa over the last quarter century. She is personally engaged in research tracking the life trajectories of a group of Tanzanian men she has followed for nearly two decades. 

Recently, Moyer's research has shifted into investigating Ecology, Health and Climate Change. This research examines the ways that climate change affects urban life, human and otherwise, as well as the relationship between climate change, environmental degradation and disease ecology. She is interested in ethnographically examining the social dynamics and consequences of climate change and disrupted ecologies, attending to geopolitical inequalities, imaginaries of sustainability and resilience, and (bio)technological fixes.

The following gives an overview of Eileen Moyer’s main research projects since completing her PhD:

• Principle Investigator. Becoming Men: Performing responsible masculinities in contemporary urban Africa. European Research Council 2015-2020.
• Co-Principle Investigator. Assessing the role of PrEP for people from HIV endemic countries (PECs) living in The Netherlands. AIDSfonds Starter Grant 2015-2016.
• Technical Advisor, Research Supervisor. Maximinzing antiretroviral treatment in Swaziland (MaxART) 2013-2015.
• Co-Principle Investigator.  Filling the Gap: Social Institutions and AIDS in Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, NWO/WOTRO-Integrated Programme 2009-2013.
• Project Coordinator, lead researcher, technical advisor.  Learning by Doing: Enhancing treatment literacy and addressing sexual and reproductive health of PLWA in Eastern Africa, AIDSFonds, 2007-2011.
• Co-Principle Investigator. Young Labor Migrants in Three Chinese Cities: A demonstration intervention project to address barriers to health care and promote sexual and reproductive health.  Funded by European Union FP-7, 2006-2009. 
• Field Research Coordinator for Kenya country study. Testing and Counseling for HIV: A Four-Country Study, United States National Institutes of Health (NIH). 2007-2009.
• Co-Principle Investigator. Social Aspects of Free AIDS Medicines in Public Health Care Settings in Tanzania and Zambia.  Funded by Swedish International Development Aid (SIDA), 2006-2007.