Academy Fellow

Megan Warin is a social anthropologist who works in the fields of health, medicine, embodiment and gender. She has made international contributions to the anthropology of food and eating, particularly around eating disorders (anorexia) and obesity. Megan’s research is intersectional and interdisciplinary, and she has long standing collaborations with academics in public health, psychiatry and medicine, and industry partners in community organisations. Long term ethnographic projects in Australia on the relationships between social class, poverty and obesity have led to engagement with State and Federal government advisors, public health programmers and Senators concerning the challenges of obesity interventions and the need to address health inequities.

Attention to the ways in which the social and biological interact and influence health across the life course and generations (developmental origins and epigenetics) has led to a sustained investigation of the ways in which the reproductive lives and bodies of women are implicated in such narratives, opening up opportunities to address reproductive justice in scientific and popular discourses. In recognition of her interdisciplinary work across the social and life sciences, Megan is an International Fellow of the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity in the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Oxford, and a biosocial Research Leader in the Robinson research Institute at the University of Adelaide. 

Professor – University of Adelaide

2017 – Research leader, Robinson Research Institute

2014-2019 Director, Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender

2020- Chair, Catherine Helen Spence Memorial Scholarship Committee, appointment by Minister of Human Service

2015 – 2019: Australian Research Council Future Fellow 

2017 - Associate Editor, Social Science and Medicine

2017 - Invited interdisciplinary board member, Mind the body: Rethinking embodiment in healthcare, led by Professor Jenny Slatman (Medical Humanities), Tilburg School of Humanities, Netherlands.

2012 - International Fellow, Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity (UBVO) Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oxford University

2011 - Member, Catherine Helen Spence Memorial Scholarship Committee, Ministerial appointment by Premier of South Australia

2012 - 2017   Co-ordinator, Australian Food, Society and Culture Network

2016 Women’s Research Excellence Award (University of Adelaide)

2012 Award for Outstanding Student Feedback in Learning and Teaching (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide)

2011 Award for Outstanding Research Performance (Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide)

2008 Exceptional Performance Award (Durham University, UK)

1. Warin, M. (2020) The ‘Gentle and Invisible’ Violence of Obesity Prevention. American Anthropologist. 122(3), pp.672-673.

2. Warin, M and T Zivkovic (2019) Fatness, Obesity and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs: Unpalatable Politics. Palgrave.

3. Warin, M. J., Kowal, E., & Meloni, M. (2019) Indigenous knowledge in a postgenomic landscape: The politics of epigenetic hope and reparation in Australia. Science, Technology, and Human Values. DOI: 10.1177/0162243919831077

4. Eli, K., & Warin, M. (2018) Anthropological Perspectives on Eating Disorders: Deciphering Cultural Logics. Transcultural Psychiatry, 55(4), 443-453.

5. Warin M, Moore V, Ulijaszek & M Davies (2016) Epigenetics and Obesity: The Reproduction of Habitus through Intracellular and Social Environments. Body & Society 22(4): 53-78. 36