Professor Theidon is a medical anthropologist focusing on Latin America. Her research interests include political violence, transitional justice, humanitarian and post-conflict interventions, gender studies and the environmental humanities. She is the author of many articles, commissioned reports, three books and an edited volume.  Entre Prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1st edition 2004; 2nd edition 2009) was awarded the Latin American Studies Association 2006 Premio Iberoamericano Book Award Honorable Mention for outstanding book in the social sciences published in Spanish or Portuguese. Her second book, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012) was awarded the 2013 Honorable Mention from the Washington Office on Latin America-Duke University Libraries Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, and the 2013 Honorable Mention for the Eileen Basker Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology for research on gender and health. In her most recent book, Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies and Kin (Duke University Press, 2022) Theidon considers the multiple environments in which conception, pregnancy, and childbirth unfold, reimagining harm to account for the impact of armed conflict on individual people as well as on more-than-human lives, bodies, and ecologies. Her co-edited volume, Challenging Conceptions: Children Born of Wartime Rape and Sexual Exploitation (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) offers cutting-edge case studies on children born of wartime rape, their mothers, families and communities, aiming to contribute to more humane policy responses and interventions. She is currently completing Theaters of War: Working with Former Combatants in Colombia, under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press. 

In 2022-2023 she is a Tisch Faculty Fellow at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. Her project is titled "#Don’tConsumeViolence: Partners for the Planet." The project's goal is to awaken consumers to the conditions under which the food they consume and beverages they drink were produced. The bananas ripening on a windowsill, the coffee percolating in those early morning hours: how might global awareness change if consumers paused to consider how many environmental defenders died in order for those items to arrive in our kitchens? Consumers can play an important role in changing the behavior of multinational companies and their business practices.  They can also play a rolein pressuring governments to live up to their duty to protect the environment and the people who defend it. Around the globe, environmental activists are under attack, and Latin America is a hotbed for violence against environmental defenders. In 2018, 84 environmental defenders were killed, with impunity. Rather than abate, in 2019, the number increased to 148 making up more than two-thirds of the world’s total. Latin America’s wealth of natural resources creates conflict between environmental defenders and businesses that wish to exploit these resources. This tension is exacerbated by governmental complicity with the multinational companies, and with the economic elites who benefit from their presence.  Who are the dead? Overwhelmingly they are Afro-descendant, Indigenous and peasant people. Surely the burden ofdefending this planet should not fall upon the shoulders of the most marginalized members of society. #Don’tConsumeViolence: Partners for the Planet aims to disrupt the supply chain of violence by developing a global consumer campaignto raise awareness of the conditions under which common products —pineapples, bananas, Coca-Cola, coffee and more —are produced in Latin America.