People
Founding Director
Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. She taught at the University of Michigan from 1989-2003 and has been at the New School for Social Research since 2004, where she was the founding chair of its revitalized Anthropology Department. She has worked for some thirty five years on the politics of knowledge, imperial formations, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, sentiments and the senses, and the form and content of archives. She has been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études, the École Normale Supérieure and Paris 8, Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory, Birzeit University in Ramallah, the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, and Irvine’s School of Arts and Literature. She continues teaching in the Bard Prison program. She is the recipient of NEH, Guggenheim, NSF, SSRC, and Fulbright awards, among others. Recent interviews with her are available at Itinerario, Savage Minds, Le Monde, and Public Culture, as well as Pacifica Radio and here. Her books include Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (1985; 1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, 2010), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009), Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016), and Interior Frontiers: Essays in the Entrails of Inequality (2022). Her edited volumes include Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (with Frederick Cooper, 1997), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (2006), Imperial Formations (with Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue, 2007), Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013), and Thinking with Balibar (2020). Her commitment to joining conceptual and historical research has led to collaborative work with historians, literary scholars and philosophers, and the journal Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, of which she is one of the co-founding editors.
stolera@newschool.edu
Managing DIRECTOR
Charles A. McDonald is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Pace University. He previously held a Visiting Assistant Professorship at New York University and Postdoctoral Fellowships at Northwestern University and Rice University. He received his PhD in anthropology and historical studies at the New School for Social Research in 2019. His writing has been published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cultural Anthropology, and American Ethnologist. His most recent publication—a chapter on the ethics of refusal—can be found in the volume Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants: Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal (2023), edited by Dalia Kandiyoti and Rina Benmayor. He is currently finishing his first book manuscript, Return to Sepharad: Citizenship, Conversion, and the Politics of Repair, an ethnography that pursues “return” as an ethnographic object, a political concept, and a mode of self-transformation. He is also in the research phase of a second ethnographic project, Queer Nightlife Ecologies: Arts of the Underground in the Era of COVID, which examines how the COVID pandemic has affected queer workers and communities in the underground house and techno music scenes. McDonald's broader interests include the anthropology of race and religion; citizenship and mobility; kinship and inheritance; subjectivity and ethics; liberalism and multiculturalism; empire and colonialism; queer studies; and experimental ethnography. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), Wenner-Gren Foundation, Center for Jewish History, the Posen Foundation, and the Sexualities Project at Northwestern University (SPAN). He has been the Managing Director of ICSI since 2015.
icsi@newschool.edu
program assistant
Clara Beccaro is a doctoral student in anthropology at the New School for Social Research, originally from France but currently a settler in Manahata, Lenapehoking. Clara's research focuses on bodily integrity and risk-taking in contemporary France, examined through the lived reality of becoming disabled and becoming transgender. Clara's ethnographic practice is grounded in visual anthropology, multimodal engagement, and creative pedagogies. On the side, Clara is a ceramicist and a film-maker.
assistanticsi@newschool.edu
