Catherine L. Besteman

Catherine Lowe Besteman is an Italian American abolitionist educator at Colby College, where she holds the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Chair in Anthropology. Her research and practice engage the public humanities to explore abolitionist possibilities in Maine. She has taught at that institution since 1994.

Her research has focused on security, militarism, displacement, and community-based activism and transformation, primarily based in Somalia, South Africa, and the U.S. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Arts, Wenner-Gren, and with a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has held other fellowships at the Institute of Advanced Study in Durham, UK, the Institute of Advanced Study at Stellenbosch University, Bellagio, and the School for Advanced Research, among others.

She also curates art exhibitions and public humanities initiatives, including Freedom & Captivity, a statewide collaborative public humanities initiative to envision and foster abolitionist visioning in Maine, and Making Migration Visible, a statewide arts-based initiative to change the narratives around migration in Maine.

Her work has been acknowledged with the 2021 Public Anthropologist Award (for Militarized Global Apartheid), the 2019 SANA (Society for the Anthropology of North America) Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, and a Leeds Honor Book Award (for Transforming Cape Town).

She has published four monographs and eight edited or co-edited volumes. She taught previously at Queens College, City University of New York. Provided by Wikipedia