A/Prof. Joseph Harris

Joseph Harris is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston University and one the leading scholars of health politics and policy in low-and-middle-income countries today. His book, Achieving Access: Professional Movements and the Politics of Health Universalism(Cornell University Press 2017), examined how and why resource-constrained countries make costly commitments to universal health coverage and AIDS treatment after transitioning to democracy. Achieving Access is one of the first books to examine struggles to institutionalize universal access to healthcare and medicine in the industrializing world comparatively (exploring Thailand, Brazil, and South Africa), and it has been used to teach officials within the Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health about comparative health systems. While he has won two Fulbrights for his research on health politics in Thailand, he has published on issues related to the politics of healthcare access and infectious disease response on a broader range of countries that include Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, and others. At Boston University, he directs the Global Health Politics Workshop, which has become the premier academic forum for work on global health politics internationally. He is currently Vice Chair of the International Studies Association’s Global Health Section, Deputy Editor of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, past Associate Editor of Social Science and Medicine, and an Editorial Board member at Health Systems and Reform and Studies in Comparative International Development. He regularly contributes to stories in major media outlets, such as National Public Radio, Washington Post, and U.S. News and World Report.