People

Faculty

João G. Biehl
Susan Dod Brown Professor and Chair of Anthropology
Brazil LAB Director
Office Phone
Office
210 E Aaron Burr Hall

João Biehl is Susan Dod Brown Professor of Anthropology and Faculty Associate at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Biehl’s main research and teaching interests center on medical and political anthropology, ethnography and critical theory, the social studies of science and technology, global health, pharmaceuticals, affect and agency, and religion and German colonialism (with a regional focus on Latin America and Brazil).

Elizabeth A. Davis
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Director of Graduate Studies
Vice-Chair, Institutional Review Board (IRB)
Office Phone
Office
122 Aaron Burr Hall

Elizabeth Davis is Associate Professor of Anthropology and a Behrman Faculty Fellow in the Humanities. Her research and writing, grounded in the European horizons and the Ottoman history of the Greek-speaking world, focus on the intersections of psyche, body, history, and power as areas for ethnographic and theoretical engagement. Her particular interest is in how the ties that bind people to communities and states are yielded and inflected by knowledge: that is, how certain kinds of truths mediate conceptions of self and conceptions of others – as psychiatric subjects, for example, or as subjects of history. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the “multicultural” borderland between Greece and Turkey. She is currently working on her second book, The Good of Knowing: War, Time, and Transparency in Cyprus (forthcoming from Duke University Press), a collaborative engagement with Cypriot knowledge production about the violence of the 1960s-70s in the domains of forensic science, documentary film, and “conspiracy theory.”

Julia Elyachar
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Associate Professor Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and Near Eastern Studies
On sabbatical for academic year 2023-2024
Office Phone
Office
130 Aaron Burr Hall

I am an anthropologist broadly trained in economics, history of political and economic thought, political economy, social theory, Middle Eastern Studies, and Arabic language. I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies. My M.A. (Harvard University) is in Anthropology, and my B.A. (Barnard College, Columbia University) is in Economics, with a Political Economy emphasis. Before moving to UC Irvine, where I was Associate Professor of Anthropology and Economics and Director of the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, I taught and held research positions in Near Eastern Studies and at the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University and at the Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I also draw on my training and professional experience in dance and improvisation as an ethnographer and teacher.

Agustín Fuentes
Professor of Anthropology
Office
123 Aaron Burr Hall

Prof. Fuentes is an anthropologist whose research focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. From chasing monkeys in jungles and cities, to exploring the lives of our evolutionary ancestors, to examining human health, behavior, and diversity across the globe, Professor Fuentes is interested in both the big questions and the small details of what makes humans and our close relations tick. Earning his BA/BS in Anthropology and Zoology and his MA and PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, he has conducted research across four continents, multiple species, and two-million years of human history.

Hanna Garth
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
On sabbatical for academic year 2023-2024
Office
129 Aaron Burr Hall

Interests
Anthropology of Food; Consumption; Inequality; Medical Anthropology; Race and Racism; Social Justice; Activism; Latin America and the Caribbean; Women and Gender Studies; Black/African American Studies

Short Bio

Hanna Garth is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist…

Rena Lederman
Professor of Anthropology
Office Phone
Office
127 Aaron Burr Hall

Professor Lederman’s recent interests have included relationality, expertise, and ethics; the politics of “method” in human sciences (particularly anthropology); disciplinary knowledges as “moral orders”; science/humanities tensions in popular and academic discourse; and bureaucratic and regulatory policies and practices.

Ryo Morimoto
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and the Richard Stockton Bicentennial Preceptor
HMEI Associated Faculty, Program in History of Science Associated Faculty
East Asian Studies Associated Faculty
Office Phone
Office
125 Aaron Burr Hall

Through his ethnographic research, Morimoto aims to create a space for and language to think about nuclear things and other contaminants as part and parcel of what it means to live in the late industrial and post-fallout era, rather than as alien species that must and should be held at a distance from humans. Morimoto is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled The Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihood in Fukushima’s Gray Zone. This book integrates environmental anthropology, recent Japanese history, and science and technology studies to understand the uses and applications of technologies in social processes whereby certain sensory-cognitive experiences are (im)materialized. Morimoto uses the term “nuclear ghost” to analyze the struggles of representing and experiencing low-dose radiation exposure in coastal Fukushima, where individual, social, political and scientific determinations of the threshold of exposure are often inconsistent.

Serguei A. Oushakine
Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures
Office Phone
Office
226 East Pyne Building

Serguei Oushakine has conducted fieldwork in the Siberian part of Russia, as well as in Belarus and Kyrgyzstan. His research is concerned with transitional processes and situations: from the formation of newly independent national cultures after the collapse of the Soviet Union to post-traumatic identities and hybrid cultural forms. His first book The Patriotism of Despair: Loss, Nation, and War in Russia focused on communities of loss and exchanges of sacrifices in provincial post-communist Russia. His current project explores Eurasian postcoloniality as a means of affective reformatting of the past and as a form of retroactive victimhood. Oushakine’s Russian-language publications include edited volumes on trauma, family, gender and masculinity. Prof. Oushakine is Director of the Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies at Princeton.

Laurence Ralph
Professor of Anthropology and SPIA Associated Faculty
Co-Director of Center on Transnational Policing
Office Phone
Office
124 Aaron Burr Hall

Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He earned both a PhD and also a Master of Arts degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree from Georgia Institute of Technology where he majored in History, Technology and Society. Laurence has published articles on these topics in various venues. In 2014 Laurence’s first book, Renegade Dreams: Living Through Injury in Gangland Chicago, was published by the University of Chicago Press. This book grapples with the consequences of the “war on drugs” together with mass incarceration, the ramifications of heroin trafficking for HIV infected teenagers, the perils of gunshot violence and the ensuing disabilities that gang members suffer. Investigating this encompassing context allows him to detail the social forces that make black urban residents vulnerable to disease and disability. Renegade Dreams received the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) in 2015.  

Ikaika Ramones
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Office
128 Aaron Burr Hall

Areas of Interest

Indigenous Studies, Political Economy and Class, Social Movements, Bureaucracy and Institutions, Oceania, Anthropology of Media

Short Bio

Ikaika Ramones is a social anthropologist researching the different internal contestations of Indigeneity in the concrete…

Carolyn M. Rouse
Ritter Professor of Anthropology
Office Phone
Office
312 Aaron Burr Hall

Carolyn Rouse is a professor of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. Her work explores the use of evidence to make particular claims about race and social inequality. She is the author of Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam, Uncertain Suffering: Racial Healthcare Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease and Televised Redemption: Black Religious Media and Racial Empowerment. Her manuscript Development Hubris: Adventures Trying to Save the World examines discourses of charity and development and is tied to her own project building a high school in a fishing village in Ghana. In the summer of 2016 she began studying declining white life expectancies in rural California as a follow-up to her research on racial health disparities. In addition to being an anthropologist, Rouse is also a filmmaker. She has produced, directed, and/or edited a number of documentaries including Chicks in White Satin (1994), Purification to Prozac: Treating Mental Illness in Bali (1998), and Listening as a Radical Act: World Anthropologies and the Decentering of Western Thought (2015). As an extension of her commitment and training in visual anthropology, in the summer of 2016 she created the Ethnographic Data Visualization Lab (VizE Lab) to work with students and colleagues on ways to visualize complex ethnographic data.  One project she is currently working on through the lab brings together 60 years of biological data with 60 years of social scientific data to study epigenetic effects on physical development. 

Beth Michelle Semel
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
History of Science Associated Faculty
Office
126 Aaron Burr Hall

Interests:

Anthropology of science, technology, and medicine; linguistic anthropology; science and technology studies; artificial intelligence; computing cultures; history of psychiatry and psychology; listening, voice, and sound; surveillance; United States

Short bio:

Beth Semel…

Jerry C. Zee
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Assistant Professor High Meadows Environmental Institute
On sabbatical for academic year 2023-2024
Office
132 Aaron Burr Hall

Interests
Environmental anthropology, feminist science studies, cultural and political anthropology of China; political ecology, meteorology and atmospheres, governance, engineering, aesthetics, materialism

Short Bio
Assistant Professor Jerry Zee is jointly appointed in the Department…

Andrea L. DiGiorgio
Lecturer in Anthropology
Princeton Writing Program
Office
307 New South Building

Andrea DiGiorgio is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and conservation biologist whose research focuses on the spaces where humans and non-human primates interact. Her primary research investigates how wild primates get required nutrients in an increasingly anthropogenic landscape, and specifically how female…

Akil Fletcher
Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows
Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and Anthropology
Office
204 Scheide Caldwell House

Akil Fletcher is an anthropologist whose research intersects the lines of anthropology, African American Studies, and game studies. He earned his B.A. in Anthropology from the City College of New York and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.

His research looks at how Black individuals create identity, community, and…

Jacob Geuder
Lecturer in Anthropology
Office
Aaron Burr Hall 309

Jacob Geuder is an urbanist with a focus on social movements, digital media, and urban politics. Geuder received his BA in Sociology and Political Sciences at the University of Konstanz, Germany, his MA in African Studies and his PhD in Urban Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. During his PhD, Geuder conducted an ethnographic…

Thalia Gigerenzer
Lecturer in Anthropology
Office
315 Aaron Burr Hall

Thalia Gigerenzer is a cultural anthropologist and multi-media artist whose research focuses on atmospheres, emotions, gender, urban space, poetics and conviviality in contemporary South Asia. Her dissertation research focused on the everyday lives of low-income Muslim women in Delhi, India, looking at their efforts to maintain the vibrancy of…

Clayton Goodgame
Lecturer in Anthropology
Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Fellow and Department of Religion
2022-2023 to 2023-2024

Clayton Goodgame is an anthropologist of religion, kinship, and the Middle East. His current research is on the Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, a church composed of a Palestinian laity and a Greek monastic hierarchy. It focuses on the religious lives of Palestinian and Greek Orthodox Christians and how they inform wider social and political…

Onur Günay
Lecturer in Anthropology
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Office
314 Aaron Burr Hall

Interests
Political and Medical Anthropology, Social and Critical Theory, Ethnographic Filmmaking, History of Anthropological Theory, Violence, Ethnic Conflict and Racialization, Displacement and Memory, Drug Use and Rehabilitation, Emergent Masculinities, Islam and the Middle East

Short Bio

Jeffrey D. Himpele
Director, VizE Lab
Lecturer in Anthropology
Office Phone
Office
319 Aaron Burr Hall

Jeff directs the Anthropology Department’s VizE Lab, an innovative hub for researchers interested in visualizing anthropological knowledge through documentary video and data visualization. He is author of Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes, and is a prize-winning documentary filmmaker.

Harini Kumar
Lecturer in Anthropology
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies

Harini Kumar is a postdoctoral research associate at the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India. She is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Islam and Muslim societies in contemporary India. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of lived religion, kinship, gender, the built environment, and migration and mobility. Her…

Sebastián Ramírez Hernandez
Lecturer in Anthropology
Office Phone
Office
313 Aaron Burr Hall

Sebastián Ramírez received a BA from Queens College CUNY in Anthropology and Psychology and a PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University. His research among internally displaced persons in his native Colombia explores the role of healthcare services in efforts to remake ideas of home and citizenship in the aftermath of violence. His…

Aniruddhan Vasudevan
Lecturer in Anthropology
Office
321 Aaron Burr Hall

Short Bio
Aniruddhan Vasudevan is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of gender and sexuality, religion, and ethics of relationality and care. He recently completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation is an ethnographic study of…