Areas of Interest: Military, war, and society; Automobility and inequality; Race and gender; Democracy; US and Asia-Pacific
Catherine Lutz is the Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of Anthropology and International Studies and holds a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology, which she chairs. She is also co-director of the Costs of War research project based at the Watson Institute.
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). Others include Reading National Geographic (Chicago, 1993) with Jane Collins, and Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988). She is past president of the American Ethnological Society, the largest organization of cultural anthropologists in the US.
She received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Swarthmore College and her PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University.
