Rachel Howard is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines the “good life” and its material and ideological manifestations in the U.S., with an emphasis on environmental imperialism, urban infrastructure, and the production of whiteness from 1950 to the present. She uses ethnographic and historical methodologies to study the practices and ideologies of post-work life, focusing on the way in which large housing development projects constructed for white middle-class Americans have contributed to the growth of private property and the acceleration of water extraction in the American West. Rachel’s research, teaching, and writing interests include linguistic and historical anthropology, experimental ethnographic narratives, feminist STS, critical race studies, and the history of the American West.

Rachel is a recipient of the National Sciences Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant. Her research has also been supported by the Society for the Anthropology of Work and, at the University of Chicago, by UChicagoGRAD and the David R. and Mady W. Segal Fund for Social Sciences Research on Military Personnel. She earned a BA in Anthropology with minors in French and English from Barnard College and an MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago.