Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University
Research Interests
Anthropology of Knowledges | Audit | Disciplinarity | Ethics | Exchange | Expertise | Gender | Regulatory bureaucracies | Science & Technology Studies |
About Rena
My doctoral degree is from Columbia University; I'm presently Professor of Anthropology, Princeton University. My interests over the past several years have concerned disciplinarity, expertise, and ethics; the politics of “method” in the human sciences; disciplinary knowledges as moral orders; science/humanities tensions in popular and academic discourse; and regulatory policies and practices relating to human research and the sharing/archiving of research materials. I also have longstanding interests in gendered/sexed experiences and meanings and in economic experience as culture: in particular, tensions among market and non-market exchange, consumption, and property forms. My first fieldwork was undertaken in the island Pacific (Papua New Guinea); my recent field, archival, and e-mediated research is based in the US. I teach courses on gender/sexuality, economic experience as culture, anthropology of ethics (with special attention to the uses and abuses of deception and disclosure in popular culture, stage magic, and the sciences), field practices, anthropology of science, and Pacific Island cultures. I begin teaching our undergraduate core course, "Experience, Evidence, and Ethnography", in Fall 2017.