Catherine Lutz

Brown University

Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Professor Emerita of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University. Her areas of interest include military, war, and society; race and gender; democracy; subjectivity and power; photography and cultural history; critical theory; anthropological methods; sociocultural contexts of science; U.S. twentieth century history and ethnography; and the Pacific Rim. She received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Swarthmore College and her PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University. Her most recent books include Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effects on Our Lives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), the co-authored Breaking Ranks: Iraq Veterans Speak Out against the War (University of California Press, 2010), The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle against US Military Posts (New York University Press, 2009), Local Democracy under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics (New York University Press, 2007, winner of a Society for the Anthropology of North America book award), and Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Beacon Press, 2001, winner of the Leeds Prize and the Victor Turner Prize). She is past president of the American Ethnological Society, the largest organization of cultural anthropologists in the United States. Lutz is also co-director of the Costs of War Project, a collaborative analysis of the human, sociopolitical, and economic impacts of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lutz’s videos are used in this Choices Program curriculum unit:
The U.S. Role in a Changing World