Anastasia Karakasidou

Pendleton East, Room 347 x3199 akarakas@wellesley.edu

Anastasia Karakasidou is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Wellesley College.

Anastasia Karakasidou is a social anthropologist. She received her doctorate degree from Columbia University in 1992. Her specializations are themes of nationhood and identity; religion and ideology; gender and social stratification; narrative and history; and anthropological theory. She has recently published a book entitled Fields of Wheat, Hills of Blood: Passages to Nationhood in Greek Macedonia, 1870-1990 with University of Chicago Press (1997), as well as a number of articles on the ideology of nationhood in Greece and the Balkans.

Since 1999, Professor Karakasidou has been involved in the study of chemical pollution, the vulnerable human body and cancer as a disease of modernity. She has been conducting a cross-cultural study on discourses of cancer by exploring different cultural understandings of the disease and examining its narration and imagery in three diverse settings: the United States, Greece, and China. Professor Karakasidou is also involved in creating new courses centering on the cultural analysis of environmental pollution and cancer (Introduction to Environmental Studies, The Triumph of Culture and The Vulnerable Body). In addition, she will be offering in spring 2003 the Whitehead seminar on "Cultures of Cancer."