School of Social and Political Science

Background

Kath Weston is an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia.  She previously held appointments at Harvard University and Arizona State University, in addition to visiting professorships at the University of Cambridge, Tokyo University, Brandeis University, Wellesley College, and Olin College. Her research focuses on bodies and visceral engagement in ways that integrate the study of kinship, political ecology, the anthropology of finance, science and technology studies, historical anthropology, and identity politics.

Weston's books include Animate Planet: Making Visceral Sense of Living in a High-Tech Ecologically Damaged World (Duke 2017), Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor (Beacon 2008), Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (Routledge 2002), Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science (Routledge 1998), Render Me, Gender Me (Columbia 1996) and Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (2nd ed. Columbia 1997).

Her British Academy award project will explore how early modern European scientific inquiries into blood circulation, generation, and gestation remain deeply embedded in contemporary understandings of prosperity, finance, and money creation. When people try to explain what happened during the crash of 2008, why should the claim that 'the global economy had a cardiac arrest' seem to make perfect sense? In a digital era when money is no longer necessarily embodied even in paper, why do human bodies remain 'good to think' when people try to grasp financial complexities that even bankers find opaque?