Virginia R. Dominguez

Virginia R. Dominguez is a political and legal anthropologist and currently serves as the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Author, co-author, editor, and co-editor of multiple books, she is perhaps best known for her work on the Caribbean (especially in “The Caribbean and Its Implications for the United States,” published by the Foreign Policy Association in 1981), her work on the United States (especially in White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana [Rutgers University Press, 1986]) and her work on Israel (especially in People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel [University of Wisconsin Press, 1989]). Her most recent books are America Observed: On an International Anthropology of the United States, co-edited with Jasmin Habib (Berghahn Books, 2017), Global Perspectives on the U.S., co-edited with Jane Desmond (University of Illinois Press, 2017) and Anthropological Lives, co-authored with Brigittine French (Rutgers University Press, 2020). She also guest-edited a 2018 issue of RIAS (the International American Studies Association’s journal) on “Walls, Material and Rhetorical: Past, Present, and Future,” and she has a forthcoming volume on neoliberalism and anthropology in Portugal’s Etnográfica, co-edited with Mariano Perelman. She was President of the American Anthropological Association from 2009 to 2011 and she has just been elected Secretary-General of the IUAES (International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences).