Professor Laura A Lewis PhD
Professor of Anthropology
Professor Laura A Lewis is a Professor of Anthropology in Modern Languages and Linguistics at the University of Southampton.
Professor Lewis received her PhD from the University of Chicago. With specializations in race and the African diaspora in Mexico and Latin America, she is the author of numerous articles and two books – an anthropological history and an ethnographic monograph. She is currently researching Latinx identities in the urban United States. With colleagues in Environment and Geography at the University Southampton, Professor Lewis is also a researcher on two collaborative projects on climate change, policy and water and food security in sub-Saharan Africa.
Professor Lewis has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in rural Mexico, where she has also done extensive research in national and local archives. She has also done ethnographic fieldwork in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the urban United States, and in rural Malawi in Southeastern Africa.
For her individual research in Mexico, she received Fellowships from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Organization of American States, the American Bar Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She has also been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London.
Her first book, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft and Caste in Colonial Mexico, won the American Society for Ethnohistory’s Erminie Wheeler-Voeglin Best Book Award in 2003. Both Hall of Mirrors and her second book, Chocolate and Corn Flour, History, Race and Place in the Making of 'Black' Mexico, are available here.
Her current collaborative work on Africa with African partner Universities and international organizations is supported by a £5 million four-year Research Councils UK Global Challenges Research Fund Challenges grant on Building Research Capacity for Sustainable Water and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa (BRECcIA) for work in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi, and a one year £150k Clusters grant, also from the RCUK GCRF, for Bridging National Strategy on Sustainable Development of Water-Energy-Food Systems to Local Scale Needs in Malawi.
Qualifications
- PhD, Anthropology, University of Chicago 1993
Appointments
- Wesleyan University, CT, Department of Anthropology, Visiting Assistant Professor and Fellow, Center for the Humanities, 1994
- University of Rochester, NY, Department of Anthropology, Visiting Assistant Professor, 1995-96
- James Madison University, VA, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Assistant, Associate and Full Professor, 1996-2012
- University of Southampton, Modern Languages and Linguistics, Professor, 2012-