School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 11-20 of 30 Results

  • Duana Fullwiley

    Duana Fullwiley

    Professor of Anthropology

    BioI am an anthropologist of science and medicine interested in how social identities, health outcomes, and molecular genetic findings increasingly intersect. In my first book, The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, 2011), I draw on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the US, France and Senegal. By bringing the lives of people with sickle cell anemia together with how the science about them has been made, The Enculturated Gene weaves together postcolonial genetic science, the effects of structural adjustment on health resources, and patient activism between Senegal and France to show how African sickle cell has been ordered in ethnic-national terms at the level of the gene. The Enculturated Gene won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2011 Amaury Talbot Prize for the most valuable work of African Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association’s 2014 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology.

    Since 2003, I have conducted multi-sited field research in the United States on emergent technologies that measure human genetic diversity among populations and between individuals. As an outgrowth of this research, I have become particularly interested in how scientists engage ideas of genetic "inclusion" in how they enlist participant involvement in specific disease research problems, and how they also grapple with social movements, historical reckoning, data privacy and racial capital. My second book, Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (UC Press, 2024), explores these issues in light of how U.S. political concepts of “race” function in genetic recruitment protocols and study designs on complex disease, “tailored medicine,” ancestry tracing, and personal genomics. Tabula Raza won the 2024 Diana Forsythe Prize granted by the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing of the American Anthropological Association.

    As of 2019, I have started new fieldwork on migration from West Africa into Europe. I am concerned with people's personal narratives of success at all costs in light of state sponsored surveillance, the simultaneous rigidity and fluidity of borders (land and sea) aided by new technologies, as well as how people draw from and create various forms of science and knowledge to forge relational trajectories that come to constitute home. This work also interrogates how human-made environmental resource scarcity pushes people to migrate or, rather, to simply move, in their quests for viable futures. This project furthermore investigates new forms of racism engendered by the newest iterations of technologically-assisted and animated border patrolling as the ocean itself is being reconceptualized as a new frontier for salvatory tech options and economic growth in Africa and elsewhere.

    My work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew and Florence White Fellows program in Medicine and the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I have also been an invited scholar at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation in Paris (1997-1998, 2000 and 2002), a USIA Fulbright Scholar to Senegal, a fellow at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2004-2005), and a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health (2005-2007). My work was selected for a Scholars Award by NSF's Science & Society Program, co-sponsored by the Directorate of Biology, from 2008-2012.

  • Angela Garcia

    Angela Garcia

    Professor of Anthropology

    BioProfessor Garcia’s work engages historical and institutional processes through which violence and suffering are produced and lived. A central theme is the disproportionate burden of addiction, depression and incarceration among poor families and communities. Her research is oriented toward understanding how attachments, affect, and practices of intimacy are important registers of politics and economy.

    Garcia’s most recent book is The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024). Set in Mexico City, it examines how violence precedes and functions in the ways families seek to care for and protect each other. Central to this work are anexos (annexes), informal and coercive rehabilitation clinics for the treatment of drug addiction that are run and utilized by the working poor, and which incorporate violence into their therapeutic practices. Anexos are widespread across Mexico (and increasingly in the United States) and are widely condemned as abusive, illegal, ineffective, and unethical. By situating anexos within a larger social and historical frame, and closely attending to life within and beyond these spaces, Garcia shows that anexos provide refuge from the catastrophic and everyday violence associated with the drug war. The book also demonstrates that anexos are the leading resource for the treatment of drug addiction among Mexico’s poor, and are an essential space of protection for individuals at risk of the intensifying violence in Mexico.

    Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010) received awards in anthropology and writing. The Pastoral Clinic explores the relationship between intergenerational heroin use, poverty and colonial history in northern New Mexico. It argues that heroin addiction among Hispanos is a contemporary expression of an enduring history of dispossession, social and intimate fragmentation, and the existential desire for a release from these. Ongoing work in the U.S. explores processes of legal “re-entry” and intimate repair that incarcerated and paroled drug users undertake, particularly within kin networks.

    Currently, Garcia is studying the environmental, social, and bodily effects resulting from Mexico City’s ongoing desagüe, the massive drainage project initiated by Spanish colonists in the seventeenth century in the Valley of Mexico. Mexico City’s desagüe speaks to some of the most pressing concerns of our time: water scarcity, humans’ relationship to changing ecologies, and chronic disease. This project examines how the desagüe remakes bodies, neighborhoods, and social worlds.

  • Thomas Hansen

    Thomas Hansen

    Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor
    On Leave from 09/01/2024 To 08/31/2025

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAnthropology of political life, ethno-religious identities, violence and urban life in South Asia and Southern Africa. Multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism

  • Ian Hodder

    Ian Hodder

    Dunlevie Family Professor, Emeritus

    BioIan Hodder joined the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology in September of 1999. Among his publications are: Symbols in Action (Cambridge 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge 1986), The Domestication of Europe (Oxford 1990), The Archaeological Process (Oxford 1999). Catalhoyuk: The Leopard's Tale (Thames and Hudson 2006), and Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (Wiley and Blackwell, 2012). Professor Hodder has been conducting the excavation of the 9,000 year-old Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey since 1993. The 25-year project has three aims - to place the art from the site in its full environmental, economic and social context, to conserve the paintings, plasters and mud walls, and to present the site to the public. The project is also associated with attempts to develop reflexive methods in archaeology. Dr. Hodder is currently the Dunlevie Family Professor Emeritus.

  • Miyako Inoue

    Miyako Inoue

    Associate Professor of Anthropology and, by courtesy, of Linguistics

    BioMiyako Inoue teaches linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of Japan. She also has a courtesy appointment with the Department of Linguistics.

    Her first book, titled, Vicarious Language: the Political Economy of Gender and Speech in Japan (University of California Press), examines a phenomenon commonly called "women's language" in Japanese modern society, and offers a genealogy showing its critical linkage with Japan's national and capitalist modernity. Professor Inoue is currently working on a book-length project on a social history of “verbatim” in Japanese. She traces the historical development of the Japanese shorthand technique used in the Diet for its proceedings since the late 19th century, and of the stenographic typewriter introduced to the Japanese court for the trial record after WWII. She is interested in learning what it means to be faithful to others by coping their speech, and how the politico-semiotic rationality of such stenographic modes of fidelity can be understood as a technology of a particular form of governance, namely, liberal governance. Publication that has come out of her current project includes, "Stenography and Ventriloquism in Late Nineteenth Century Japan." Language & Communication 31.3 (2011).

    Professor Inoue's research interest: linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, semiotics, linguistic modernity, anthropology of writing, inscription devices, materialities of language, social organizations of documents (filing systems, index cards, copies, archives, paperwork), voice/sound/noise, soundscape, technologies of liberalism, gender, urban studies, Japan, East Asia.

  • Lochlann Jain

    Lochlann Jain

    Professor of Anthropology

    BioJain is an award-winning author and Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, Visiting Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’ College London, and a Research Affiliate at VIAD, University of Johannesburg. His work aims to unsettle some of the deeply held assumptions about objectivity that underlie the history of medical research. Jain is the author of Injury (Princeton UP: 2006); Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (UC Press: 2013); and a book of drawings, Things that Art: A Graphic Menagerie of Enchanting Curiosity (U of Toronto Press: 2019).

    Jain is currently working on two books. The first, supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, develops the concept of The WetNet, which refers to fluid bonding among humans and animals in ways that create pathways for the transmission of pathogens. Specifically, mid-century bioscientific practices such as blood harvesting and transfusion, and vaccine development and testing involved exchanges in human and animal effluvia, the risks of which have largely been disavowed. Jain’s current book project elucidates the concept of The WetNet through a rigorous history of the hepatitis B virus and the development of the first hepatitis B vaccine.

    The second project, “The Lung is a Bird and a Fish,” is a cultural history of drowning in prose and drawing.

  • Richard Klein

    Richard Klein

    Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Anthropology and of Biology, Emeritus

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCoevolution of human form and behavior over the past 6-7 million years, with special emphasis on the emergence of fully modern humans in the past 60-50,000 years. Field and lab research in South Africa.

  • Matthew Kohrman

    Matthew Kohrman

    Associate Professor of Anthropology, and by courtesy, of Medicine (Stanford Prevention and Research Center) and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies

    BioMatthew Kohrman’s research and writing bring anthropological methods to bear on the ways health, culture, and politics are interrelated. Focusing on the People's Republic of China, he engages various intellectual terrains such as governmentality, gender theory, political economy, critical science studies, narrativity, and embodiment. His first monograph, Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China, raises questions about how embodied aspects of human existence, such as our gender, such as our ability to propel ourselves through space as walkers, cyclists and workers, become founts for the building of new state apparatuses of social provision, in particular, disability-advocacy organizations. Over the last decade, Prof. Kohrman has been involved in research aimed at analyzing and intervening in the biopolitics of cigarette smoking among Chinese citizens. This work, as seen in his recently edited volume--Poisonous Pandas: Chinese Cigarette Manufacturing in Critical Historical Perspectives--expands upon heuristic themes of his earlier disability research and engages in novel ways techniques of public health, political philosophy, and spatial history. More recently, he has begun projects linking ongoing interests at the intersection of phenomenology and political economy with questions regarding environmental attunement and the arts.

  • Tanya Marie Luhrmann

    Tanya Marie Luhrmann

    Albert Ray Lang Professor

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHer work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic.

  • Liisa Malkki

    Liisa Malkki

    Professor of Anthropology, Emerita

    BioLiisa H. Malkki is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include: the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture. Her field research in Tanzania exlored the ways in which political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people. This project resulted in Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In another project, Malkki explored how Hutu exiles from Burundi and Rwanda, who found asylum in Montreal, Canada, imagined scenarios of the future for themselves and their countries in the aftermath of genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Malkki’s most recent book, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (with Allaine Cerwonka) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her most recent book-length project (based on fieldwork from 1995 to the present) examines the changing interrelationships among humanitarian interventions, internationalism, professionalism, affect, and neutrality in the work of the Finnish Red Cross in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross.