AB Brown University 1999; MA, PhD University of California at Berkeley 2001, 2008
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Union College 2009-2011
Book
Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina, Stanford University Press, 2012.
Articles and Book Chapter
“‘I am a Petroleum Product’: Making Kinship Work on the Patagonian Frontier,” Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistence of Kinship, Susan McKinnon and Fenella Cannell, Eds. Santa Fe, NM: SAR Press Advanced Seminar Series, Forthcoming 2013.
"Engendering the Company: Corporate Personhood and the 'Face' of an Oil Company in Metropolitan Buenos Aires," Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 2010, 33(1).
"Neoliberal Associations: Property, Company and Family in the Argentine Oil Fields," American Ethnologist, 2008, 35(4).
Popular Press
"When the State Takes Stock," The Huffington Post, May 4, 2012.
See the course offerings webpage for descriptions of SOAN courses:
- Introduction to Anthropology (SOAN 102)
- The Craft of Anthropological Inquiry (SOAN 211)
- Communities and Cultural Change in Latin America (SOAN 255)
- The Cultural Politics of Nature
- Environmental Justice Research Seminar
- Business, Government, Power
- The Ethnography of Corporations
- Oil Politics in Global Perspective
- David M. Schneider Paper Prize, American Anthropological Association, 2007
- Phi Beta Kappa of Northern California Dissertation Fellowship, 2006
- University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center Fellowship, 2006
- Fulbright Fellowship for Research in Argentina, 2005
- University of California, Berkeley Dissertation Research Award, 2005
- Center for Latin American Studies Tinker Research Grant, 2002
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2000
- Regents of the University of California Pre-Dissertation Humanities Fellowship, 2000
- Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies (declined), 2000
Elana Shever is a cultural anthropologist with interests in the politics of natural resources, globalization, capitalism, and the relationship among large-scale political and economic processes, kinship, citizenship, and personhood.
Her book, Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina (Stanford University Press, 2012) explores how people’s lives intersect with the global oil industry through a close look at Argentina’s experiment with privatizing its national oil company in the name of neoliberal reform.
Her current research project examines the meanings, uses, and values of dinosaurs (bones, models, images, texts and toys) in the United States.