Ellen Kozelka is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, joining the faculty in 2023. She holds a B.A. in Anthropology from University of Notre Dame and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology from the University of California, San Diego. As an Anthropologist and Global Mental Health (GMH) scholar, her work examines how structures of inequity such as coloniality, gender, poverty, and/or ethnicity shape the formation of, access to, and experience in mental health care systems for marginalized populations in the US and México. She specifically focuses attention on experience within novel or “non-traditional” forms of care, whether that be community based, religious substance use treatment for ethnically Mexican women or emergent digital mental health tools for persons with serious and persistent mental illness.

She designs independent projects and collaborates on team-based interdisciplinary and comparative research to investigate the inequities built into social structures and what they tell us about the dynamic cultural conceptions of mental illness treatment and its experience. In doing so, her work explores the impossibility of mental health treatment for individuals (in any form) to fully address the structural and cultural factors like immigration systems, colonialism in medicine, racism, gender-based violence, and socioeconomic insecurity that create distress in people’s lives as a call to action for anthropologists and medical practitioners alike to reshape mental healthcare research and practice to counteract those structures.