Bilinda Straight

Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Professor of Anthropology

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Location:

3062 Moore Hall, Mail Stop 5365

Mailing address:

Department of Gender and Women's Studies
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1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5365 USA

Education:

Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1997
M.F.A., Creative Writing, �鶹��ý, 2015
M.A., Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1990
B.A., English and Women's Studies, Lake Erie College, 1987, summa cum laude

Certification:

Graduate Certificate, Women's Studies (in tandem with Ph.D.), University of Michigan, 1997

Teaching Interests:

Body modification, sex and gender norms
Inequality and differencing, persisting colonialisms
Theoretical and philosophical approaches to human experience
Frankenstein, technology, ethics

Research Interests:

The nature of emotion and human experience
Warfare, masculinity, emotion, morality
Critical intersection of evolutionary and cultural paradigms

Bio:

Dr. Bilinda Straight is a professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at �鶹��ý. She is a cultural and biological anthropologist whose work focuses on the nature of emotion and human experience, particularly through the impact of cultural and moral norms on pastoralists in the midst of northern Kenya’s extreme environment and chronic low-intensity warfare.

Beginning in 2008, in a series of National Science Foundation funded projects, her work has examined human experience through an embodied approach to health, and most recently, at the intersection between human and world suggested by epigenetics through an ethnographically “thick” approach. She has been doing field work with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya since 1992. Straight has received a Fulbright and four National Science Foundation Awards.

Additional information and a list of publications can be found on her .