Emma Nolan-Thomas, a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, is a recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Award (DDRA).

Emma research project is entitled “Cultivating the Heart: Cardiovascular Disease and Islam in Central Java”; her field work will be in Yogyakarta. She will study how patients of cardiovascular disease (CVD) view heart disease and how health professionals draw on a range of medical, traditional, and spiritual practices of health-cultivation to holistically treat it. She is particularly interested in understanding the relationship between medicine, Islam, and understandings of health and well-being in Indonesia.

She is affiliated with the Center for Religious and Cross-Cultural Studies, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta.