Alisse Waterston

Non-resident Long-term Fellow for Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence,
and Inequality, SCAS.
Presidential Scholar and Professor of Anthropology Emerita, the City University of New York

Alisse Waterston is presidential scholar, professor emerita and past chair at the John Jay College of
Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She is a cultural anthropologist who studies urban
poverty and the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality. Her most
recent cross-cultural work focuses on the processes and aftermaths of political violence, ethnic and
religious conflict, displacement and transnationalism, remembering, diaspora, cultural trauma and
identity formation.

Waterston is the author or editor of seven books, including the award winning My Father’s Wars:
Migration, Memory and the Violence of a Century (10th Anniversary edition 2024). She is author
of the graphic book, Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning with illustrator Charlotte
Hollands (2020). Her previous titles are Street Addicts in the Political Economy; Love, Sorrow, and
Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence; An Anthropology of War; Anthropology off the
Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing; and Gender in Georgia: Feminist Perspectives on Culture, Nation,
and History in the South Caucasus. Recent publications include “Intimate Ethnography: Bridging Story,
Memory, History,” with Barbara Rylko-Bauer in Czas Kultury (2023), and “Art and Anthropology in
Graphic Form” with Charlotte Corden, in Exceptional Experiences: New Horizons in Anthropological
Studies of Art, Aesthetics, and Everyday Life edited by Petra Rethmann and Helena Wulff (2023).

Waterston served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2015-17. She is
the founding editor of Open Anthropology and served as editor of North American Dialogue. An Inter-
national Scholar of the Open Society Institute, Tbilisi State University (2012-15), she received an
honorary doctorate from the Ilia State University, Tbilisi, in 2018.

Alisse Waterston serves as editor of the book series, Intimate Ethnography (Berghahn Books). Her
article, “Intimate Ethnography and the Anthropological Imagination: Dialectical Aspects of the Personal
and the Political in My Father’s Wars” is the most downloaded 2019 article in American Ethnologist.
Forthcoming is “Improvising Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" (kritisk ethnografi; Swedish
Journal of Anthropology) based on the keynote Waterston presented at the Swedish Anthropological
Association (SANT) conference in April 2024.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2024-25.