Steph McIsaac
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, on leave for the 2023–2024 academic year
As both a medical anthropologist and a movement practitioner, I am interested in how history lives in the body—and in the ways people and traditions access, express, and transform embodied history through healing practices. My current research explores the radical recentering of the body in some unlikely domains: in the neuroscience of trauma and in psychotherapeutic practice, both of which are often criticized for their tenacious privileging of mind over body. My work tracks increasingly popular paradigms of “embodied trauma," focusing on somatic methods that are thought to support healing through a combination of breath, sound, and movement. I ask how these modalities shape the experiences of therapists, clients, teachers, and students; how neuroscientists study the physiological effects of such practices on the body; and how all of them reconcile the meeting of science and spirituality in their work. My previous research centered on the forms of care that emerge in the aftermath of generational displacement and dispossession in South Africa, querying how the embodied knowledge of community health workers disrupt Euro-American psychotherapeutic norms.
Across my teaching and research, I am curious about how colonial apprehensions of race, gender, and the body continue to impact lived experiences, caring practices, and possibilities for world-building. I am especially interested in therapeutic experiments that imagine embodied life outside of these colonial frames. As such, I am drawn to the potential for body-centered contemplative practices to complement anti-oppressive praxis in thoughtful and politically engaged ways. I teach weekly yoga classes and practice contemporary and improvisational forms of dance, while also undergoing further training and certification in other somatic modalities.
At Bowdoin, I teach classes on the afterlives of colonialism; embodiment and healing; global health; structural inequities and health disparities; psychological anthropology; science and spirituality; as well as survey courses on the foundations, methods, and theory of cultural anthropology. I am passionate about creating classroom spaces that are embodied, mindful, compassionate, and tap into students’ inherent creativity and wisdom.
Education
- PhD, University of California, Berkeley
- BA, Cape Breton University