The Body, Southern Africa, Interspecies, Gender, Development, Economic Growth/Degrowth, Public Health

American Anthropological Association, African Studies Association, Society for Medical Anthropology, Society for Cultural Anthropology, PEN America Center

Julie Livingston is Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.  She is interested in the body as a moral condition and mode of experience, taxonomies and the relations that challenge them, African thought and political and moral imagination; relations between species, the environmental and public health consequences of capitalism and economic growth; financial debt; and cars/automobility. She is also interested in writing and questions of formal expression.  Her current research explores the relationship between suicide and environmental change.  

Her most recent book (co-authored with Andrew Ross), Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality (OR Books) comes out of her work with the NYU Prison Education Program Research Lab.  Her previous books include Self-devouring Growth: a Planetary Parable told from Southern Africa (Duke University Press), Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Duke University Press), Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana (Indiana University Press), as well as two special issues of Social Text: Collateral Afterworlds (coedited with Zoe Wool) and Interspecies (coedited with Jasbir Puar).  Her essays and articles have appeared in a wide-range of venues including, Africa, Daedalus, Public Books, Cultural Anthropology, The Journal of Clinical Oncology, The Guardian, Medicine, Anthropology and Theory, and South Atlantic Quarterly. The recipient of numerous awards and prizes, Livingston has been an invited fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.  In 2013, she was named a MacArthur fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.