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ICIS Executive Director
(For Dr. Knauft's academic home page, please click here.)
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BRUCE KNAUFT |
Bruce M. Knauft is Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Executive Director of the Institute for Comparative and International Studies (ICIS) at Emory University. As the head of ICIS, Dr. Knauft plans, administers, budgets, and orchestrates aspects of international and comparative study in Emory College. He supervises the senior administrative staff of ICIS and the faculty directors of Emory’s area studies programs, language center, and study abroad office.
Professor Knauft’s research combines politico-economic and cultural study across different world areas, historically, and in the present. His current work includes the geopolitical, economic, and cultural status of the U.S. vis-à-vis other nations and world areas, including in comparison with previous world powers and empires. He is also interested in "States at Risk" and the critical study
of development and NGO intervention.
Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Dr. Knauft conducted his two years of doctoral research among a remote rainforest people of Papua New Guinea, the Gebusi, with whom he still maintains contact. During his twenty-one years at Emory, he has developed comparative interests and mentored student research across a range of world areas, topics, and disciplinary perspectives.
His publications have addressed issues of political economy and culture; modernity and marginality; politics and violence; and gender and sexuality. His seven books are:
Good Company and Violence: Sorcery and Social Action in a Lowland New Guinea Society (University of California Press, 1985)
South Coast New Guinea Cultures: History, Comparison, Dialectic (Cambridge University Press, 1993)
Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology (Routledge Press, 1996)
From Primitive to Post-colonial in Melanesia and Anthropology (University of Michigan Press, 1999)
Exchanging the Past: A Rainforest World of Before and After (University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Critically Modern: Alternatives, Alterities, Anthropologies (Edited, Indiana University Press, 2002)
The Gebusi: Lives Transformed in a Rainforest World (McGraw-Hill, 2005)
Contact information: bruce.knauft@emory.edu
Staff Contact: Kate Bennett, Program Associate, kate.bennett@emory.edu : 404-727-4663