Affiliates

Brinton Ahlin



Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
ahlin@uchicago.edu
Interests:

Sociocultural anthropology; socialism and capitalism; Islam; materiality and semiotics; Former Soviet Union; Central Asia; Tajikistan.

PhD, New York University, 2018

Photograph of Christopher Bloechl

Christopher Bloechl



Teaching Fellow
cbloechl@uchicago.edu
Interests:

Linguistic anthropology, Mayan languages and culture, language standardization, media, Yucatan, highland Guatemala.

PhD, University of Chicago, 2023

Andrew Brandel

Andrew Brandel



Associate Instructional Professor of the Social Sciences
abrandel@uchicago.edu
Interests:

Anthropology of literature; politics of language; (mis)translation; anticolonialism; migration; ordinary language philosophy; South Asia; Germany

PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 2016

Jennifer Cole



Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development; Chair, Committee on African Studies
jcole@uchicago.edu
Interests:

Socio-cultural anthropology; anthropology of youth and generational change; memory and forgetting; historical anthropology; Christianity; migration, gender and sexuality; Madagascar, Africa, and France.   

PhD, UC Berkeley, 1996

Molly Cunningham



Harper-Schmidt Fellow
mollyc@uchicago.edu
Interests:

Crisis; US; cities; finance; politics; structural racism; secular authority; science and technology; emergency management; municipal bankruptcy; Detroit; activism; ethnographic method; publics; embodiment; history; narrative; revelation.

PhD, University of Chicago 2019

Sanghamitra Das



Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology; Committee on Southern Asian Studies
Office: Haskell 224
sanghamitrad@uchicago.edu
Interests:

India; South Asia; race, caste and indigeneity; Dalit and Adivasi Studies; genetics; illness narratives; (bio)citizenship; political economy of health; environment; embodiment.

PhD, Arizona State University, 2023

Alireza Doostdar



Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies and Anthropology of Religion, Divinity School
doostdar@uchicago.edu
Interests:

Anthropology of religion; Islam; modernity and the supernatural in Iran; Islamic spiritual cinema; modernist universalist religious movements; state entanglements with sorcery; the decades-old project of Islamizing the sciences in Iran.

PhD, Harvard, Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies, 2012

Sean Dowdy



Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
sdowdy@uchicago.edu
Interests:

Kinship; Myth and Religion; Political Ritual; Psychoanalysis; Semiotics; Economic Anthropology; Social Theory; Northeast India.

PhD, University of Chicago, 2017

Renate Lellep Fernandez



Associate (non-faculty)
Interests:

Nutritional deficiency in Spain.

PhD Anthropology, Rutgers University, 1988

Ali Feser



Collegiate Assistant Professor, Social Sciences
Interests:

Visual culture; industrial capitalism; the history of science; materiality; temporality; fantasy; environmental toxicity; embodiment and the senses; gender and sexuality; kinship; Rochester, New York and the Great Lakes region; multimodal ethnography.

University of Chicago, 2020

Michele Friedner



Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Human Development
michelefriedner@uchicago.edu
Interests:

Category and experience of deafness and disability, particularly in urban India.

PhD, University of California at Berkeley, 2011

Rafadi Hakim

Rafadi Hakim



Teaching Fellow
hakimf@uchicago.edu