Ca’la K. Connors is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Northwestern University, specializing in biocultural approaches to maternal and infant health and intergenerational stress transmission. Her dissertation investigates how Cameroon’s colonial Anglophone–Francophone divide becomes embodied during pregnancy, contributing to maternal-infant health outcomes. Through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, biomarker collection, and survey research with displaced Anglophone women in Francophone Douala, she examines how linguistic identity, marginalization, and everyday forms of social support shape maternal stress biology and influence infant birth outcomes. By integrating hormonal measures with ethnographic narratives, her work traces how identity, solidarity, and exclusion are embodied during pregnancy and may reverberate across generations.   

 

Her broader interests include the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, black feminism, reproductive justice, and the biocultural pathways through which inequality shapes health. She has conducted research in the United States, the Dominican Republic, and Cameroon, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and multiple Northwestern University grants.   

 

Before beginning her doctoral studies, Connors worked in community engagement and disability services in Colorado for five years, producing applied qualitative and survey-based research for state-funded agencies. She is also training as a DONA International-certified birth doula, deepening her commitment to reproductive justice and care-centered scholarship.