About

Beatriz Reyes-Foster is an associate professor and graduate coordinator in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on medical anthropology, specifically on the cultural interactions between medical systems and those who use them. 

Her previous work focused on suicide prevention in Yucatan, Mexico, and more recently on the encounters and disconnects between Yucatec Maya patients and psychiatrists in an acute ward of a public psychiatric hospital in Yucatan. Her current research focuses on issues surrounding birth in Central Florida, including how women seeking vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC) made decisions about their medical care. 

Reyes-Foster has written about identity, media representations of indigenous people, personhood and self, cultural constructions of health and illness, and the connections between religion, spiritual beliefs, and biomedicine. She holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley.