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, the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality, the processes and aftermaths of political violence, displacement and migration, remembering, diaspora, and 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, finalist in the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award (illustrated by Charlotte Corden). Her earlier 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.

Among her recent articles are: “Improvising Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Anthropological Perspectives,” in kritisk etnografi: Swedish Journal of Anthropology (2025); “Intimate Ethnography: What’s It Good For?” in American Anthropologist (2025); and “Living in and with a Regime of Silencing: Narrative Control and Totalitarian Inclinations since October 7, 2023” in Today's Totalitarianism (2024). Her published works of anthropologically informed fiction are the short stories: “Observations”, “Reading and Writing in the Company of Anthropologists”, and “Interiors.”

Waterston served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2015-17. In 2024 she received the Franz Boas Award bestowed on anthropologists whose careers demonstrate extraordinary achievements. An International 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 is founding editor of Open Anthropology and past editor of North American Dialogue. She currently 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.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2025-26.

SCAS Talks Podcast - Episode 5: In Search of Light in Dark Times External link, opens in new window.