Brackette F. Williams is an American anthropologist, and Senior Justice Advocate,

Open Society Institute Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a grantmaking network founded and chaired by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially supports civil society groups around the world, with a st ...

. She is currently an associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona. Williams graduated from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

with a BS, from the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. T ...

with a master's in Education, and from the

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...

with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology. She has taught at Duke University, Queens College, the New School for Social Research, the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

, and the

. Her work has centered on the

Caribbean The Caribbean (, ) ( es, El Caribe; french: la Caraïbe; ht, Karayib; nl, De Caraïben) is a region of the Americas that consists of the Caribbean Sea, its islands (some surrounded by the Caribbean Sea and some bordering both the Caribbean Se ...

region, and in particular, examined how racial and ethnic categories are reproduced in

Guyana Guyana ( or ), officially the Cooperative Republic of Guyana, is a country on the northern mainland of South America. Guyana is an indigenous word which means "Land of Many Waters". The capital city is Georgetown. Guyana is bordered by the ...

nationalism. Categories and classification systems - how they are developed, what basis they have in cultural contexts, and how they are put to use, by whom and for whom - have been a general theme in her work as well. Williams's

ethnographic Ethnography (from Greek ''ethnos'' "folk, people, nation" and ''grapho'' "I write") is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject ...

work on the categories informing

capital punishment Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty, is the state-sanctioned practice of deliberately killing a person as a punishment for an actual or supposed crime, usually following an authorized, rule-governed process to conclude that t ...

in the United States demonstrates has also been an interest. She was editor of the journal ''Transforming Anthropology''.

Awards

* 1997

MacArthur Fellows Program The MacArthur Fellows Program, also known as the MacArthur Fellowship and commonly but unofficially known as the "Genius Grant", is a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 ind ...

* 2008 Soros Justice Fellowships

Works

*Williams, Brackette F. 1989. "A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain." ''Annual Review of Anthropology'' 18: 401– 444. *Williams, Brackette F. 1991
''Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle''
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, . *Williams, Brackette F. 1995. Classification Systems Revisited: Kinship, Caste, Race, and Nationality as the Flow of Blood and the Spread of Rights. In ''Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis,'' ed. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, 201-236. London: Routledge. *Williams, Brackette F., ed. 1996
"A Race of Men, A Class of Women"
''Women out of place: the gender of agency and the race of nationality'', Routledge, . *Williams, Brackette F. 2005
"Getting out of the Hole"
''South Atlantic Quarterly'' 104(3):481-499 *Williams, Brackette F. 2008. “‘Dominando’ os bárbaros: Barbados, ativismo abolicionista e classificação da pena de morte.” ''Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 23'' (68): 23-39.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Williams, Brackette American anthropologists Cornell University alumni University of Arizona alumni Johns Hopkins University alumni Duke University faculty Queens College, City University of New York faculty The New School faculty University of California, Berkeley faculty Johns Hopkins University faculty University of Chicago faculty University of Arizona faculty MacArthur Fellows Living people 1955 births