Laurian Bowles
Vann Professor of Racial Justice | Associate Professor & Chair, Anthropology | Director, Davidson in Ghana Program
Education
- Ph.D. Temple University
- M.A. SOAS, University of London, Anthropology of Media
- B.A. Pennsylvania State University, African American Studies
- B.A. Pennsylvania State University, Journalism
Background
I am a cultural and visual anthropologist who researches, writes and teaches about social mobility and the visual economies of women’s labor in Ghana and the African Diaspora. My research attends to the way women’s activism take shape through ordinary forms of mobilization and refusals in public and intimate spaces. I am especially interested in the haptic nature of photographs, the circulation of pictures as material artifacts, and the way race, class, and queerness are formed through visual storytelling.
I have published articles in Feminist Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, The Journal of African History and African Arts.
My book, Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness and Modernity in Accra (Penn Press, 2025) draws on a decade of fieldwork with women porters in Ghana to illustrates how antiblackness, queer sexual politics, and feminized labor inform state and social sensibilities about what constitutes progress and modernity in Accra.
Teaching
- AFR 301: Major Thinkers in Africana Studies: Zora Neale Hurston
- AFR 331: African Feminisms
- ANT 205: Racism
- ANT 232: Contemporary Ghana
- ANT 234: Urban Africa/Popular Culture
- ANT 257: African Roots, American Soils
- ANT343: Feminist Anthropology
- ANT 373: Decolonizing Anthropology Theory
- ANT 372: Visual Anthropology