Jean Comaroff is the Alfred North Whitehead Research Professor of African and African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town. Educated at the University of Cape Town and the LondonSchool of Economics, she was formerly distinguished service professor of anthropology, and director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Her research, primarily in southern Africa, has focused on the interplay of capitalism, modernity, and colonialism, and on theorizing the contemporary
world from beyond its hegemonic centers. Her writing has covered a range of more specific topics: religion and medicine, magic and materiality, law and crime, democracy and difference. Publications include Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: the Culture and History of a South African People (1985), “Beyond the Politics of Bare Life: AIDS and the Global Order” (2007); “Populism and Late Liberalism: A Special Affinity?” (2011); also, with John L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (vols. l [1991] and ll [1997]); Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (2000), Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (2006), Ethnicity, Inc. (2009),Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (2011), The Truth About Crime: Sovereignty, Knowledge, Social Order (2016), (ed. with John Comaroff), The Politics of Custom: Chiefship, Capital, and the State in Contemporary Africa (2018), (with JP Meiu) Ethnicity, Commodity, In/Corporation (2020). Recent papers include “The Dis/Appearing Laboring Body,” “Vigilantism and the Politics of Sovereignty,” and “African Masculinities in Question.”