Bianca Williams (anthropologist)
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Bianca Christel Williams (born 1980) is an American
cultural anthropologist Cultural anthropology is a branch of anthropology focused on the study of cultural variation among humans. It is in contrast to social anthropology, which perceives cultural variation as a subset of a posited anthropological constant. The portman ...
, feminist, author and academic, whose work centers on black Americans. In November 2016, the American Anthropological Association and the
Oxford University Press Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
honored her with the AAA/Oxford University Press Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching of Anthropology
Williams
is an associate professor of anthropology at
Graduate Center The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY Graduate Center) is a public research institution and post-graduate university in New York City. Serving as the principal doctorate-granting institution of the ...
of the City University of New York


Biography

Williams studied cultural anthropology at Duke University, earning a B.A. in 2002, an M.A. in 2005 and a Ph.D. in 2009, as well as a Graduate Certificate in African and African American Studies. In 2009, she was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder where her courses included coverage of black women, civil rights, the black power movement and "the ethnography of American blackness." She encourages her students to read fiction, poetry and self-help books side-by-side with academic scholarship. In January 2017, she was promoted and received tenure in the Department of Anthropology at the University Colorado, and later that year she was hired as an associate professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. In 2018 she published ''The Pursuit of Happiness: Black Women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism''. Williams describes her pedagogical approach in "Radical Honesty: Truth-telling as Pedagogy for Working through Shame in Academic Spaces", a chapter in "Race, Equity, and the Learning Environment" (May 2016) encouraging her students to challenge racist institutional traditions by overcoming shame and fostering change.


Selected publications

*Williams, Bianca C. (2018) ''The Pursuit of Happiness Black women, Diasporic Dreams, and the Politics of Emotional Transnationalism''. Durham: Duke University Press. . . * * *


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Williams, Bianca Living people 1980 births American anthropologists American women anthropologists African-American women writers African-American writers American writers African-American feminists American feminists American women academics University of Colorado Boulder faculty Duke University alumni 21st-century African-American academics 21st-century American academics 21st-century African-American women 20th-century African-American academics 20th-century American academics 20th-century African-American women