My Biography
Alisse Waterston is a scholar and advocate who studies the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequity. She is Presidential Scholar and Professor Emerita, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and author or editor of seven books including the award winning My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century, an intimate ethnography (10th anniversary edition, 2024), and the graphic novel Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning (2020; illustrated by Charlotte Corden). A Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality, Professor Waterston served as AAA President in 2015-17. Recent 2024 publications include: “Living in and with a Regime of Silencing: Narrative Control and Totalitarian Tendencies since October 7. 2023” in Today’s Totalitarianism; “Reading and Writing in the Company of Anthropologists,” in A Collection of Creative Anthropologies; “Intimate Ethnography: Bridging Story, Memory, History,” with Barbara Rylko-Bauer, translated in the Polish for Czas Kultury; and the soon to be published “Improvising Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: Anthropological Perspectives” in the Swedish Journal of Anthropology. She is editor of the Berghahn Book series, Intimate Ethnography.