Micaela di Leonardo

Professor of Anthropology and Performance Studies
Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research
Northwestern University
PhD, Anthropology, University of California-Berkeley, 1981
l-di@northwestern.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Additional biographical information

Cultural anthropologist Micaela di Leonardo studies race- and gender-inflected social and economic inequality, with a focus on American urban life. Through the complementary lenses of political economy and street-level ethnography, she investigates shifting U.S. and global life chances and experiences, with special attention to multiple public spheres.

Much of di Leonardo’s work aims to connect local and global forces of economic and cultural change in innovative ways. Her most recent book, New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America (SAR Press, 2008), co-edited with Jane Collins and Brett Williams, challenges the presumption that capitalist-style “liberalization” will lead inevitably to market growth and optimal social ends and describes how American neoliberal practices are fundamentally raced and gendered. The volume includes di Leonardo’s theoretical introduction and her case study on the neoliberalization of consciousness in the United States.

di Leonardo’s awards and honors include a National Endowment for the Humanities Resident Scholarship in 2005-06 at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M., and the Distinguished Achievement in North American Studies and Anthropology in Media prizes from the American Anthropological Association. She was the first holder of the rotating endowed Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Chair from 2002 to 2005 at Northwestern. Her work has been supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. di Leonardo came to Northwestern in 1991 after having taught at Oberlin College and Yale University and worked on postdoctoral research in economics at American University.

Current Research

Historical Ethnography of New Haven, Conn. Currently, di Leonardo is finishing “The View from Cavallaro’s,” a cross-class, cross-race, feminist historical ethnography of political economy and public culture in New Haven, Conn. Over her decades of involvement in that fieldwork and analysis, she became further interested in the role of black American media, most particularly black radio shows.

Minority and Mainstream Media. Another project, linked to di Leonardo's New Haven ethnography and the subject of several published articles, is a consideration of changing American minority media worlds and their connections to mainstream media. She has analyzed a case study of the most successful, and least popularly represented, syndicated radio show, “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” which reaches 8 million listeners each weekday. This show, featuring music, humor, and politics, offers surprisingly progressive views and has directly engaged national political struggles far more than mainstream media analysts recognize.

Selected Publications

Books

di Leonardo, M., with J. Collins and B. Williams, eds. 2008. New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America. Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR Press.

di Leonardo, M. 1998. Exotics at Home: Anthropologies, Others, and American Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (Women in Culture and Society Series).

di Leonardo, M., with Roger Lancaster, eds. 1997. The Gender/Sexuality Reader: Culture, History, Political Economy. New York: Routledge.

di Leonardo, M, ed. 1991. Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

di Leonardo, M. 1984. The Varieties of Ethnic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender Among California Italian-American. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Reissued 2007.

Articles and Chapters

di Leonardo, M. 2009. The trope of the pith helmet: America's anthropology, anthropology's America. In Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing, ed. A. Waterston and M. Vesperi, 160-71. Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.

di Leonardo, M. 2008. Whose homeland? The new imperialism, neoliberalism, and the American public sphere. In Rethinking America: The Imperial Homeland in the 21st Century, ed. J. Maskovsky and I. Susser. Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Press.

di Leonardo, M. 2008. Gender roles. Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, ed. B. G. Smith. New York: Oxford University Press.

di Leonardo, M. 2008. New global and American landscapes of inequality (introduction). In New Landscapes of Inequality: Neoliberalism and the Erosion of Democracy in America, ed. J. Collins, M. di Leonardo, and B. Williams, 3-20. Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR Press.

di Leonardo, M. 2008. The neoliberalization of minds, space, and bodies: Rising global inequality and the shifting American public sphere. In New Landscapes of Global Inequality, ed. J. Collins, M. di Leonardo, and B. Williams, 191-208. Santa Fe, N.M.: SAR Press.

di Leonardo, M. 2008. Neoliberalism, nostalgia, race politics, and the American public sphere: The case of the Tom Joyner Morning Show. Cultural Studies 22(1): 1-34.

di Leonardo, M. 2007. Dwight Conquergood, political economy, performance studies. Cultural Studies 21(6): 810-14.

di Leonardo, M. 2007. City. In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. G. Hendler and B. Burgett, 43-44. New York: New York University Press.

di Leonardo, M. 2006. Mixed and rigorous cultural studies methodology—an oxymoron? In Questions of Method in Cultural Studies, ed. M. White, J. Schwoch, and D. Gaonkar, 205-18. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.

di Leonardo, M., and J. Maskovsky, eds. 2006. Force of a thousand nightmares: Global inequality and the American scene (special issue) Identities: 13(1): 1-7.

di Leonardo, M. 2006. There's no place like home: Domestic domains and urban imaginaries in New Haven, Connecticut. Identities 13(1): 33-52.