Kathryn Linn Geurts

Associate Professor Kathryn Linn Geurts has been teaching at Hamline University in Saint Paul, Minnesota, since 2002. Her anthropological research focuses on investigating bodily experience – not through a Western lens but through a West African perspective. Her monograph Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community concerns the cultural construction of sensory orientations among Ewe-speaking people in Ghana. It was nominated for the Melville J. Herskovits Award for most distinguished publication in African Studies (2003).

She earned a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College (1984), and an M.A. (1991) and Ph.D. (1998) from the University of Pennsylvania. She was the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship for ethnographic research in southeastern Ghana (1993-95). She held a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) post-doctoral research position at the University of Chicago in the Department of Comparative Human Development (1998-2000), and was a Weatherhead Residential Fellow at the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience in Santa Fe, New Mexico (2000-2001).

At Hamline University she teaches a range of courses that engage the burgeoning scholarship about bodily and sensory experience and the socio-political effects of a physicalist bias in global culture. During her tenure as a Guggenheim Fellow, Ms. Geurts and her family will reside in Accra where she will research and write about how Ghanaians make sense of and deal with disability oppression.

Profile photograph by James O’Neal.

Visit the website for the University of California Press to read more about Culture and the Senses: Bodily Ways of Knowing in an African Community, by Kathryn Linn Geurts.