Faye V. Harrison is a Professor of African American Studies and  Anthropology as well as a Faculty Affiliate with the Program on Women & Gender in Global Perspectives, the Center for African Studies, and the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies. She is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in the study of social inequalities, the paradoxes of human rights, and intersections of race, gender, class, & (trans)national belonging (or not belonging).  She has also contributed to the history and  politics of anthropology and of African American & African Diaspora studies. Some of her recent writings address domestic and global divisions of intellectual labor and performing diverse acts of theory-work on “ex-centric” stages. 

She earned her BA at Brown University and her MA and PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University.  She has done her most intensive research in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, and the United States, but her scholarly pursuits and professional activities have also taken her to many other places in the world, including Nigeria, South Africa, India, Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan, and China. She has published extensively on the gendered division of labor within Jamaica’s urban informal economy; the interplay of gangs, crime, and politics in Jamaica; the impact of neoliberal globalization on everyday life in Jamaica, Cuba, and the United States; racism, antiracism, and the paradoxes of human rights in the global context; and critical race feminist methodology as a tool for global research.  

Dr. Harrison is the author of Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age and editor of and contributor to Resisting Racism & Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, & Human Rights; African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (co-ed.); and three editions of  Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation.  She has contributed to several important anthologies on the African Diaspora, among them:  Afro-Descendants, Identity, and the Struggle for Development in the Americas; Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line; Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora; and Blackness in Latin America & the Caribbean. Her writings also appear in significant feminist collections, among them: Third World Women & the Politics of Feminism; Women Writing Culture; Situated Lives: Gender & Culture in Everyday Life; Gender & Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural & Economic Marginalities; and most recently Feminist Activist Ethnography (for which she wrote the foreword). 

Among the awards she has received are:  the Presidential Award from the American Anthropological Association (2007 and 2018), the Distinguished Service Award from the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (2018), the William R. Jones Most Valuable Mentor Award from the Florida Education Fund (2013), the Legacy Scholar Award from the Association of Black Anthropologists (2010), the Zora Neale Hurston Award for Mentoring, Service & Scholarship (2007) from the Southern Anthropological Society, and the Society for the Anthropology of North America Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America (2004).  Most recently, the Society for Applied Anthropology selected her to receive the Bronislaw Malinowski Award at the SfAA's 2022 annual meeting.

She is a past President of the Association of Black Anthropologists (1989-91) and also served twice on the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (1990-91, 1999-01). From 1993-2009, she chaired the Commission on the Anthropology of Women, a unit of the International Union of Anthropological & Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). In 2013 she was elected to a five-year term as President of that world organization. During her term of office, the executives of both the IUAES and the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) collaborated in establishing the bicameral World Anthropological Union (WAU).  She co-chaired WAU's inaugural steering committee.