John Hartigan


John  Hartigan
Professor, Department of Anthropology, College of Liberal Arts
Director, Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies

Phone: +1 512 232 9201
Email: johnhartigan@austin.utexas.edu

Media Rep Contact

Daniel Oppenheimer (primary)
512-475-9712
email

Lauren Macknight (primary)
512-232-6504
email

 
 

John Hartigan examines the rhetorical maze of racial discourse in contemporary American culture. His work stems from the idea of how "race" is used similarly on plants and people (such as, races of corn). Just as “indigenous” first referred to plants and later to people, so too has the concept of race shifted historically from applying to nonhumans and then humans. Hartigan analyzes how breeders, horticulturalists, and geneticists posit forms of parallels between humans and maize, in order to develop a new analytical perspective on racial thinking broadly.

His research interests include anthropology of science (comparative study of genomics research in the United States and Mexico); ethnography of race (theories, methods, and practice, with an attention to cultural articulations of whiteness); American culture (class and racial discourses, along with questions of cultural form in the U.S. public sphere).

Media Rep Contact

Daniel Oppenheimer (primary)
512-475-9712
email

Lauren Macknight (primary)
512-232-6504
email