Sarah O'Neill
Associate Professor and FEDtWIN researcher
Obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2013. Her PhD research was concerned with local people’s opposition to the national ban on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Fouta Toro, northern Senegal. The thesis was awarded the Audrey Richards Prize of the African Studies Association of the UK in 2014.
Between 2013 and 2017 she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp, Belgium. Research collaborations were concerned with malaria clinical trials and research ethics, health-seeking behaviour and neonatal health at the Medical Research Council in the Gambia and on intra-vaginal practices and reproductive health in Tanzania. She was also the PI of the qualitative part of a study looking at African men’s involvement in FGM/C in Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK (Men Speak Out) funded by Daphne. In 2014 she obtained a SOFI grant from the Flemish Ministry for Science and Technology for a 3 year interdisciplinary study aiming to contribute to the identification of the cause of Nodding Syndrome/Epilepsy (Cameroon, Tanzania and Uganda).
In 2015-2016 she was a Visiting Scholar at the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford.
Between 2017 and 2021 she worked as a consultant on FGM/C for the World Health Organization (WHO) and for the European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE).
In 2018 she started working as a lecturer at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) teaching ethnographic methods, research design and medical anthropology in anthropology at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences and Qualitative Methods and Contextual Factors at the School of Public Health.
Between 2019 and 2022 she held a gendernet funded postdoc position at the School of Public Health-ULB, to work on the health systems response to female genital cutting with partners in Canada, France, Sweden and Switzerland.
In 2022 she was a Visiting Professor at the Anthropology Department of the University of Toronto, Canada.
Since 2022 she holds an Associate Professor position Medical Anthropology and a FEDtWIN position between LAMC-ULB and the Royal Museum of Central Africa (Tervuren) to work on the anthropology of food.
