Research

Williams anthropology and sociology professors are noted for their commitment to interpretive and humanistic research and fieldwork. Our recent projects range from a documentary film about pre- and post-Taliban Afghanistan to qualitative studies of everyday survival strategies in post-socialist Russia.

Our faculty have undertaken research in Afghanistan, Australia, Canada, Israel, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Guatemala, Japan, Nepal, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, Tanzania, the United Kingdom and various parts of the United States.

Our published work includes: 

• David B. Edwards’s Caravan of Martyrs (University of California Press) 
• Kim Gutschow’s Being a Buddhist Nun (Harvard University Press) 
• Christina Simko’s The Politics of Consolation: Memory and the Meaning of September 11 (Oxford University Press)
• Peter Just’s Dou Donggo Justice (Rowman & Littlefield)
• James L. Nolan Jr.’s What they Saw in America (Cambridge University Press) 
• Antonia Foias’s Ancient Maya Political Dynamics (University Press of Florida) 
• Olga Shevchenko’s Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow (Indiana University Press)
• Ben Snyder’s The Disrupted Workplace: Time and the Moral Order of Flexible Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press)
• Joel Lee’s Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion (Cambridge University Press)

Scholarly work by members of the department has been published in Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, German, Hungarian, Mandarin, Greek, Tamil, and Dutch.