Bilinda Straight

Bilinda Straight
Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Professor of Anthropology
Location: 
3062 Moore Hall, Mail Stop 5365
Mailing address: 
Department of Gender and Women's Studies
Western Michigan University
1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5365 USA
Education: 
  • Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1997
  • M.F.A., Creative Writing, Western Michigan University, 2015
  • M.A., Anthropology, University of Michigan, 1990
  • B.A., English and Women's Studies, Lake Erie College, 1987, summa cum laude
Certification: 
  • Graduate Certificate, Women's Studies (in tandem with Ph.D.), University of Michigan, 1997
Teaching interests: 
  • Body modification, sex and gender norms
  • Inequality and differencing, persisting colonialisms
  • Theoretical and philosophical approaches to human experience
  • Frankenstein, technology, ethics
Research interests: 
  • The nature of emotion and human experience
  • Warfare, masculinity, emotion, morality
  • Critical intersection of evolutionary and cultural paradigms
Bio: 

Dr. Bilinda Straight is a professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at Western Michigan University. She is a cultural and biological anthropologist whose work focuses on the nature of emotion and human experience, particularly through the impact of cultural and moral norms on pastoralists in the midst of northern Kenya’s extreme environment and chronic low-intensity warfare.

Beginning in 2008, in a series of National Science Foundation funded projects, her work has examined human experience through an embodied approach to health, and most recently, at the intersection between human and world suggested by epigenetics through an ethnographically “thick” approach. She has been doing field work with Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya since 1992. Straight has received a Fulbright and four National Science Foundation Awards.

Additional information and a list of publications can be found on her personal website.