Professor Sophie Day

Sophie Day is Professor Emerita, Anthropology, Goldsmiths and Principal Research Fellow in the School of Public Health at Imperial College London. She is Co-Director of the Pears Cumbria School of Medicine Research Hub at the University of Cumbria where she is Professor in the Institute of Health.

She trained at the University of Cambridge, Stanford University, Ca., and the London School of Political and Economic Science where she was awarded her PhD for research on spirit possession in Ladakh, North India. She then joined the Anthropology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London where she became Head of Department 2005-2008. She established the Praed Street Project in London with Professor Helen Ward, which ran services and conducted research with sex workers from 1986 to 2017.

Her 2007 monograph, On the Game: Women and Sex Work (London: Pluto Press) was awarded the Eileen Basker Prize and the Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems. She established the Patient Experience Research Centre with Professor Helen Ward in the School of Public Health at Imperial College in 2011, where she continues to work. A monograph with Celia Lury and Helen Ward, The Generic Person: Personalization in digital culture, health and data science (forthc. 2026, Bloomsbury) resulted from their collaboration in a medical humanities project, ‘People Like You’ (2018-2022) and her monograph, Rendering Houses in Ladakh, was published with Routledge, 2023.