Duke Cultural Anthropology

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For more information please contact: Pat Bodager
 

Chair

    • Orin Starn
    • Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History and On leave fall 2012
    • Orin Starn is Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History. He has wide-ranging interests including Latin America, Native North America, social movements and indigenous politics, the history of anthropology, activist anthropology, and, more recently, sports and society. His newest book, "The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports ...
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Director of Undergraduate Studies

Director of Graduate Studies

Faculty

Professor

    • Anne Allison
    • Robert O. Keohane Professor of Cultural Anthropology; Professor of Women's Studies
    • Anne Allison is a cultural anthropologist who researches the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her work spans the subjects of sexuality, pornography, and maternal labor to the globalization of Japanese youth products and the precarity of irregular workers. ...
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    • Lee D. Baker
    • Dean of Academic Affairs of Trinity College; Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Sociology
    • Lee D. Baker is Dean of Academic Affairs of Trinity College of Arts and Sciences, Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He received his B.S. from Portland State University and doctorate in anthropology from Temple University. ...
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    • Engseng Ho
    • Professor of Cultural Anthropology, History and Duke Islamic Studies Center
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    • J. Lorand Matory
    • Lawrence Richardson Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies
    • J. Lorand Matory is the Director of the Center for African and African American Research and Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. He conducts field research in Brazil, Nigeria, Benin Republic, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica and the US. Choice magazine named his Sex and the Empire That Is No More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in ...
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    • Diane M Nelson
    • Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women's Studies
    • My work is concerned with subjectivity and power and draws on close to 25 years of work in Guatemala (over seven years in country). Specifically, I try to understand how complex social formations like nationalism, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality intersect with violence and the state to produce people’s senses of identity. I began working in Guatemala in ...
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    • William M O'Barr
    • Professor of Cultural Anthropology, English and Sociology
    • William M. O'Barr, Ph.D. Northwestern 1969, is currently writing books about advertising and masculinity and about the history of legal anthropology. His extensive publications focus primarily on legal anthropology and include such concerns as law and politics in rural Africa, communication in trial courtrooms in America, and access to justice. His ...
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    • Charles D Piot
    • Professor of Cultural Anthropology, African & African American Studies and Women's Studies and Acting Chair fall 2012
    • I do research on contemporary culture and politics, as well as on histories of slavery and colonialism, in francophone West Africa. My first book, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (1999) attempted to retheorize a classic out-of-the-way place as within the modern and the global. My new book, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa After ...
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    • Irene M Silverblatt
    • Professor of Cultural Anthropology, History and Women's Studies
    • Irene Silverblatt researches the cultural dimensions of power. She studies how “race-thinking” and gender relations were integral to the making of the modern world as well as how historical memory has shaped feelings of national belonging and demands for universal rights. These interests are both historical and contemporary, and have taken Silverblatt to the Inca ...
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    • Orin Starn
    • Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History and On leave fall 2012
    • Orin Starn is Chair and Professor of Cultural Anthropology and History. He has wide-ranging interests including Latin America, Native North America, social movements and indigenous politics, the history of anthropology, activist anthropology, and, more recently, sports and society. His newest book, "The Passion of Tiger Woods: An Anthropologist Reports ...
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Associate Professor

    • Ralph A Litzinger
    • Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Women's Studies; Faculty Director of Global Semester Abroad; Coordinator, Duke Undergraduate Initiatives in China; Director, Duke Engage, Beijing
    • I received my doctorate in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Washington in Seattle. My early research focused on the culture and politics of the ethnic borders in China. I have published on Marxist nationality theory in China, on ethnic and indigenous revitalization in the post-Cold War global order, on gender and ethnic representation, ...
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    • Louise Meintjes
    • Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Music
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Assistant Professor

    • Anne-Maria B Makhulu
    • Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African & African American Studies
    • Anne-Maria Makhulu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2003. Her research interests cover: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, neoliberalism, the ...
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    • Laurie McIntosh
    • Assistant Professor
    • Laurie McIntosh is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University. Professor McIntosh specializes in the anthropology of Europe, migration, critical race and gender studies, and film and visual studies. Her research explores the ethics and politics of immigrant integration ...
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    • Harris Solomon
    • Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health
    • I am interested in connections between the body, its environments, and longevity in India, specifically in the context of chronic illness in Mumbai. As India becomes increasingly portrayed as the site of an "epidemiological transition" -- a shift from infectious to chronic disease burdens said to accompany economic development -- my research questions ...
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Lecturer

    • Robin Kirk
    • Executive Director, Duke Human Rights Center
    • Kirk is the author of three books, including More Terrible Than Death: Massacres, Drugs and America’s War in Colombia (PublicAffairs) and The Monkey’s Paw: New Chronicles from Peru (University of Massachusetts Press). She is the coeditor of The Peru Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University) and helps edit Duke University Press’s World Readers series. Her essay on Colombia and human rights appears in Human Rights and Conflict Resolution in Context: Colombia, Sierra ...
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    • Charlie D Thompson
    • Curriculum and Education Director, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and Adjunct Professor of Religion
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Associated Faculty

    • Edna Andrews
    • Director, Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies; Professor of Linguistics and Cultural Anthropology
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    • Bayo Holsey
    • Assistant Professor of African & African American Studies and Cultural Anthropology
    • Bayo Holsey is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her work examines the public history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in West Africa and the African diaspora. She is the author of Routes of Remembrance: Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana, which won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Prize ...
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    • Walter D Mignolo
    • William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature and Romance Studies; Professor of Spanish and Cultural Anthropology
    • Global Coloniality, Critical Cosmopolitanism, Modern/Colonial World System
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    • William M. Reddy
    • William T. Laprade Professor of History; Professor of Cultural Anthropology
    • My teaching responsibilities include European history, French history from the eighteenth century to the present, cultural theory (especially the joint methodological interests of historians and anthropologists). My research in the past has dealt with such issues as the social history of industrialization, comparative social history of the modern era, the history of emotions ...
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    • Julie Tetel Andresen
    • Associate Professor of English and Cultural Anthropology
    • Julie Tetel (Andresen) writes in the field of linguistic historiography, focusing on French, German, and American theories of language from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. She is the author of Linguistics in America 1769-1924: A Critical History (Routledge, 1990, paperback edition 1996). She is currently writing a manuscript ...
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    • Ara Wilson
    • Director of the Study of Sexualities; Associate Professor of Women's Studies and Cultural Anthropology
    • My work contributes to the feminist ethnography of globalization by providing theoretically engaged descriptions of transnational sites and processes. My approach combines attention to political economy, critical studies of culture, and post-colonial critiques of Eurocentrism. I use long term fieldwork in Bangkok, Thailand to explore how sexuality, ...
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Visiting Faculty

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    • Richard L Collier
    • Archivist, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History. Instructor
    • Of Autarchic Expressionism: Rethinking Resistance and Subjectivity through Ahmad Ar-Raysuni during Morocco's Colonial Encounter
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    • Tomas A. Matza
    • Visiting Faculty
    • In broad terms, my research has addressed the interplay between political-economy, expertise and subjectivity in the period following the Soviet collapse in Russia. My current book project, Subjects of Freedom: Psychologists, Power and Politics in Postsocialist Russia, focuses on newly minted “experts of the soul” in Russia—psychotherapists, ...
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    • Kevin B. Sobel-Read
    • Visiting Faculty
    • My ongoing research examines relationships between capital flows, sovereignty, and globalization. As such, my work bridges the continuum between the tangible practices of on-the-ground legal transactions and the complex theories of global commerce and community. In particular, I am interested in national law as the link between local legal action, whether ...
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    • Susanne B Unger
    • Visiting Faculty
    • My research and teaching interests have focused on the political and social uses of media and the arts, with an area focus on Germany. Specifically, my research investigates the beliefs and practices that inform government-sponsored and corporate Filmbildung (film education) programs for young people in early 21st century Germany. I use film education efforts as ...
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    • Katya Wesolowski
    • Lecturing Fellow of Thompson Writing Program and Cultural Anthropology
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Professor Emeriti

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    • Ernestine P. Friedl
    • Professor Emerita
    • Ernestine Friedl, Ph.D. Columbia 1950, is a James B. Duke Professor Emerita. She taught at Wellesley College and Queens College of the City of New York before coming to Duke in 1973. She has been Visiting Professor at Harvard and Princeton Universities. She has edited the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Her major interests are in the anthropology ...
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Staff

Staff Assistant

    • Patricia D Bodager
    • Department Administrator, Director of Undergraduate Studies Assistant
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    • Kelly Freeman
    • Director of Graduate Studies Assistant and Payroll Specialist
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Other

Graduate Students

    • Yakein M. Abdelmagid
    • Neoliberalism and Immaterial Labor, Public Art and Media Production, Politics, Hope and Despair in Egypt.
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    • Layla D. Brown
    • My project examines various aspects of Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution pre and post the death of Hugo Chavez through the lens of Black Feminist critiques in order to ask; 1) what might the struggles of some of their most disenfranchised citizens – Black/Afro descended women – reveal about the pros and cons of the global legacy of radical ...
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    • Jennifer Chien
    • Corporate social responsibility and community development in China.
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    • Yeongjin Cho
    • Territoriality and transnationalism, everyday life of anthropology and space; China, Tibet, Northern India.
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    • Mackenzie Cramblit
    • Politics of modernity in late capitalism; agricultural development; everyday crisis; narratives of social difference; postcolonial studies; queer theory; affect theory; Islam. Cameroon, France, Germany.
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    • Stephanie Friede
    • Globalization, Neoliberalism and poltics of memory, Spain
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    • Patrick Galbraith
    • Alternative forms of intimacy emerging in contemporary Japanese capitalism, Japan
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    • Brian Goldstone
    • anthropology of religion and secularism; sovereignty; miracles; demonology; media and aesthetics; ethics and sensibility; philosophy and critical theory; political theologies; science studies; intellectual history; ethnographic writing
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    • Yidong Gong
    • Health commodity and care flows between China and Tanzania
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    • Jay Hammond
    • Oxycontin Abuse, Political Economy of Pharmaceuticals, Music, United States
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    • Ameem Lutfi
    • Politics, Local Understandings, Post-Colonialism, Pakistan
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    • Erin D. Parish
    • Space/place/power, anthropology and history, anthropology of the Americas.
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    • Samuel Shearer
    • Politics of development, Urban planning and infrastructure, Central Africa
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    • Tamar R Shirinian
    • Cultural production, feminist theory, Armenia and Armenian Diaspora in Los Angeles.
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    • Brian Smithson
    • Mass Media, Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity, West Africa
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    • Elena S. Turevon
    • Security, Cultural Politics, Violence, Middle East
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    • Louis Yako
    • Iraqi gender dynamics and the wars in the region from the Iran-Iraq conflict to the present
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    • Serkan Yolacan
    • Politics, Globalization, Urban Anthropology, Turkey
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    • Cagri Yoltar-Durukan
    • State ethnography, theories on sovereignty, governmentality, subjectivity, post-colonial theory; Middle East/Turkey.
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Alumni

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    • Jason Anderman
    • Counsel, Becton, Dickinson and Co. and Adjunct Professor, Seton Hall Univ School of Law
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    • Pamela Block
    • Associate Dean for Research, School of Health Technology & Management; Associate Professor Occupational Therapy, School of Health Technology & Management; and Director, Disability Studies Concentration, Ph.D. in Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
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    • Kelsey Cameron
    • Self-representation in the legal system; cross-cultural navigation of the system.
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    • Anne Dana
    • Gender, anthropology of law, social construction theory, human rights.
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    • Katherine Frank
    • Research Faculty, Department of Sociology
    • Intimate Labors: Masculinity, Consumption, and Authenticity in Five Gentlemen's Clubs
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    • Micah C. Gilmer
    • My project focuses on a group of 13 African American high school football coaches. The first part of the dissertation challenges the myth of the emotionally inept (Black) male by examining the ways these men share intimate conversation and build community. The second part engages the coaches who also are educators, examining their critiques of the ...
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    • Lila E. Gray
    • Assistant Professor, Music Department (Ethnomusicology)
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    • Carie Little Hersh
    • Graduate Student, Anthropology Department
    • PMS as a Defense for Violence: Women, Culture and the Law
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    • Susan F. Hirsch
    • Associate Professor, Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution
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    • Heather Johnson -- JD/MA
    • Kindship and gender, science studies, international law.
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    • Sowmya Krishnamoorthy -- JD/MA
    • Dissemination of information across cultures using digital mass-media and its legislation
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    • Gonzalo Lamana
    • Assistant Professor, Hispanic Languages and Literature
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    • Katherine Lambert-Pennington
    • Adjunct Associate Professor, Anthropology
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    • Evelyn Legare
    • Program Manager, Walking/Cycling/Planning, Melbourne, Australia
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    • Sangeeta Luthra
    • Adjunct Assistant Professor, Anthropology
    • The Cultural Politics of Development in the Age of NGOs: Grassroots Development in an Indian Metropolis
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    • Elizabeth McBrearty -- JD/MA
    • Gender and the American legal system, reproductive rights law, queer theory and transexuality
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    • Gwen McCarter
    • Muslim diaspora (Turks in Germany), space, modalities of visual representation
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    • Susan McDonic
    • Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology
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    • Lisa Neuman
    • Assistant Professor, Anthropology and Native American Studies
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    • Michael Scher
    • General Counsel, Nexum, Inc and PhD student in Anthropology
    • Language and Dispute Resolution: A Look at the Subject and its Discipline
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    • Jessica Shulruff
    • JD/MA
    • Juncture where politics and culture collide, human rights; Latin America
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    • Clare Talwalker
    • Visiting Assistant Professor, International and Area Studies Program
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  • African Fabric