Harrington Distinguished Professor
Sociocultural Anthropologist
fbabb@unc.edu
319-400-1468
Alumni Building 407
Website
Research Interests
Gender, Race, and Sexuality; Critical Development Studies, Urbanization in the Global South, Tourism Studies, Latin American Studies, Central Andes, Central America
Specializations
Cultural Anthropology, Economic Anthropology, Feminist AnthropologyResearch Background
I am a cultural anthropologist specializing in gender and sexuality as well as race and class in changing contexts in Latin America. My courses in Anthropology and Latin American Studies include such areas as gender, race, and sexuality; cultural politics; feminist ethnography; travel and tourism. I am active in the Anthropology Department’s Concentration in Race, Difference, and Power. My latest two book projects consider gender and race in Andean Peru, based on my decades of research in the region. Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology (U of California Press, 2018) examines feminist debates centering Andean women from the 1970s forward–debates in which I myself engaged and now reconsider in relation to decolonial projects in feminist and world anthropologies. I put my past writings in conversation with those of others in order to reopen questions of durable inequalities, even as Peru seeks to rebrand itself as a modernizing nation. Now I am at work on another book, Scaling Differences: Place, Race, and Gender in Andean Peru, that is a multi-sited ethnography based on research I have conducted in an indigenous rural community, a small Andean city, and among Andean migrants living in Lima. I am interested in the ways racialized and gendered geographies shape perceptions of difference. In these social landscapes and mobilities across them, gender and race relations are frequently the ground where intense struggles are waged.
Education
PhD, University of Buffalo