Corinne A. Kratz

Corinne A. Kratz

Fellow: Awarded 1996
Field of Study: Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Competition: US & Canada

Emory University

Corinne A. Kratz is Professor of Anthropology and African Studies Emerita at Emory University, where she also co-directed the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship for a decade. During that time, CSPS was the home of Institutions of Public Culture, a collaborative program supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and Emory University. The Institutions of Public Culture program fostered exchange and linkages among museums, universities, and cultural institutions in Atlanta and South Africa through fellowships, internships, workshops, and seminars. Kratz is currently Emory’s director of the African Critical Inquiry Program, which continues those collaborations through annual workshops in Cape Town and research awards for African doctoral students studying in South Africa.

Kratz’s writing focuses on culture and communication; performance and ritual; museums, exhibitions, photography and representation. She began doing research in Kenya in 1974 and has been collaborating with colleagues in South Africa since 1999. Kratz is the author of Affecting Performance: Meaning, Movement, and Experience in Okiek Women’s Initiation (re-issued in 2010) and The Ones that are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition (2002), which won the Collier Prize for Still Photography and Honorable Mention for the Arnold Rubin Outstanding Publication Award.

In addition to publishing numerous articles and curating museum exhibitions, she also co-edited Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (2006) and a special issue of Visual Anthropology. Kratz has received grants and fellowships from Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and others. Most recently she was awarded the Heilbrun Distinguished Emeritus Fellowship to work on her new book, How Do Ethnographers Know? Communicative Foundations of Ethnographic Knowledge Production. She has served on the Board of the African Studies Association, on editorial and advisory boards, and as a nominator for the Carnegie Corporation’s Scholars program. She currently serves on the Board of the Council for Museum Anthropology. Kratz lives in Santa Fe and is a research associate of the Museum of International Folk Art there.

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