Bilinda Straight
Western Michigan University
1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5365 USA
- 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
- Graduate Certificate, Women's Studies (in tandem with Ph.D.), University of Michigan, 1997
- Body modification, sex and gender norms
- Inequality and differencing, persisting colonialisms
- Theoretical and philosophical approaches to human experience
- Frankenstein, technology, ethics
- The nature of emotion and human experience
- Warfare, masculinity, emotion, morality
- Critical intersection of evolutionary and cultural paradigms
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.