Amrapali Maitra

Class of 2010, Postcolonial Studies
Physician, anthropologist, and writer; Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine, Stanford University
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Thesis Title: Madness as a Language and a Language for Madness: Readings of Indian Literature

What Now: Caring for hospitalized patients, leading health equity research for Stanford’s Department of Medicine, and teaching medical humanities.

What Next: My first book, Sita’s Lament: On Culture and Domestic Violence in India, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press.

Follow Me: amaitra.com

History & Literature gave me a way to bring together questions that have shaped my life as a physician, anthropologist, and writer: How do people make sense of suffering? Whose accounts are heard and believed? How do histories of inequality enter the most intimate parts of our lives? Studying postcolonial literature, feminist theory, and South Asian history helped me understand illness within the worlds of family, labor, culture, and power.

After Harvard, I earned my MD and PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and completed internal medicine residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital back in Boston. I am now a hospitalist and Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Stanford, where I lead health equity research for the Department of Medicine. My scholarship spans social medicine and patient-centered approaches to care. I also teach in the medical humanities and help lead a course pairing medical students with patients to form relationships illuminating the lived experience of illness.

My forthcoming book with Princeton draws on ethnographic research with women in India to explore domestic violence and the everyday work of enduring harm and seeking care. Writing it has brought me back to questions I first encountered in Hist & Lit about gender, interpretation, and the relationship between language and lived experience.

The habits I developed in tutorials—close reading, attending to context and nuance—remain central to my work. They shape how I listen at the bedside, what I notice in fieldwork, and how I write. I continue to find pleasure and purpose in moving among these forms of inquiry, and in helping students imagine lives in medicine that leave room for the humanities.

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