About

Sarah Lamb is Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanistic Social Sciences and Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. A cultural and medical anthropologist, she studies how people construct their sociocultural worlds and identities, with particular attention to age, gender, the body, family, religion, and nation. Drawing on ethnographic research in both India and the United States, she examines everyday life practices and experiences alongside the medical, legal, and cultural discourses that shape them. Lamb received her undergraduate degree in religious studies from Brown University and her PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago, followed by postdoctoral training in medical anthropology and sociocultural gerontology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Lamb’s award-winning dissertation on aging, gender, and personhood in Bengal formed the basis for her first book, White Saris and Sweet Mangoes. She later conducted extensive fieldwork among Indian immigrant families in Boston and San Francisco, examining how older adults and their families negotiated aging, kinship, and cultural identity across India and the United States. Follow-up research in Kolkata and New Delhi explored aging, elder care, modernity, and the growing transnational dispersal of families in urban India, leading to her book Aging and the Indian Diaspora: Cosmopolitan Families in India and Abroad.

More recent research has focused on changing gender and social norms in both India and the United States. In India, Lamb studied the experiences of never-married women, contributing to scholarship on gender, exclusion, and social change through her book Being Single in India: Stories of Gender, Exclusion, and Possibility. Her current research examines contemporary ideals of “successful aging” in the United States and comparatively in India, exploring how older adults navigate cultural expectations surrounding health, independence, care, and later life.