Laurian Bowles
Chair & Associate Professor of Anthropology | Director of Davidson in Ghana
Education
Ph.D. Temple University
M.A., SOAS University of London
B.A. Pennsylvania State University
Background
I am a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches, writes and teaches about social mobility and the visual economies of women’s labor in Ghana and the African Diaspora. My research attends to the way women’s activism take shape through ordinary forms of mobilization and refusals in public and intimate spaces. I am especially interested in the haptic nature of photographs, the circulation of pictures as material artifacts, and the way race, class, and queerness are formed through visual storytelling.
I have published articles in Feminist Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, The Journal of African History and African Arts.
I also maintain a scholastic and artistic interest in the photographic narratives of women’s leisure and the sensory politics of feminist praxis.
Teaching
AFR 301: Major Thinkers in Africana Studies: Zora Neale Hurston