Liberty Barnes

Barnes is a medical sociologist and award-winning author. Her research examines how medical institutions are shaped by cultural beliefs and how scientists and medical authorities serve as cultural authorities on gender, family, and childhood. Dr. Barnes is currently conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a children’s hospital in Oregon for her next book, Pediatric Medicine: A Modern Love Story. The project is funded by the National Science Foundation.

In 2015, Dr. Barnes’s first book Conceiving Masculinity: Male Infertility, Medicine, and Identity (Temple University Press 2014) won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book of the Year Prize presented by the British Sociological Association. Dr. Barnes’s research on the invisibility of male infertility in American culture has been featured by dozens of media outlets, including NBCNews, ABCNews, The Atlantic, Slate, and the Times of London. She has been interviewed by WHYY Philadelphia, Minnesota Public Radio, Texas Public Radio, and Voice of Russia in UK. In 2014 her talk at TEDxCambridge was featured on the TEDx homepage as an Editor’s Pick.

Dr. Barnes holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at San Diego and worked as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Cambridge. A Pacific Northwest native, Dr. Barnes lives in Oregon with her family where she is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon.