Faculty Profile
James Ellison
(he/him/his)Associate Professor of Anthropology (2005)
Contact Information
Denny Hall Room 307
717-245-1902
Bio
A broadly trained cultural anthropologist, Ellison researches political and economic transformations and culture in eastern Africa, focusing on colonialism, socialism, and "neoliberalism." His main fieldwork sites are in Tanzania and Ethiopia. He also co-directs a summer field school in Tanzania to teach anthropological research methods.
Education
- B.A., Michigan State University, 1987
- M.A., University of Florida, 1990
- Ph.D., 1999
2025-2026 Academic Year
Fall 2025
AFST 220 Global Eastern Africa
Cross-listed with ANTH 255-01. This course examines global connections in the intersections of culture and power that underlie contemporary issues in eastern Africa. The globally marketed indigenous cultures and exotic landscapes of eastern Africa, like current dilemmas of disease and economic development, are products of complex local and transnational processes (gendered, cultural, social, economic, and political) that developed over time. To understand ethnicity, the success or failure of development projects, the social and economic contexts of tourism, responses to the AIDS crisis, the increasing presence of multinational corporations, and other contemporary issues, we will develop an ethnographic perspective that situates cultural knowledge and practice in colonial and postcolonial contexts. While our focus is on eastern Africa, the course will offer students ways to think about research and processes in other contexts.
ANTH 255 Global Eastern Africa
Cross-listed with AFST 220-03.
ANTH 345 The Future in Ruins
Distress in our world raises pressing questions about the future. What will it be like? Is it singular? Who gets to shape futures? How do futures relate to what came before, and to what exists now? Possible futures permeate people's world-building efforts. Crafted in relational presents, futures also reside amid the ruins of varied pasts. We will examine how future-making embodies hoped for futures across cultures in the present and past and in our own lives. Our pursuit will include architecture, built environments, landscapes, art, and social networks. We will explore how various agents collaborate in future-worlds, including other forms of life, materials, technologies, and milieus. We will also study temporal dimensions of future-making, and how the things humans help create constantly experience unmaking. From these lessons we will collaborate to imagine new world-building possibilities and implications for ethnographies of the future.