Ethnic Studies Home

The Faculty
 • Gloria Cuadraz, Ph.D.
 • Duku Anokye, Ph.D.
 • Manuel Avalos, Ph.D
 • Luis Cabrera, Ph.D.
 • Shari Collins-Chobanian, Ph.D.
 • Alejandra Elenes, Ph.D.
 • Kristin Koptiuch, Ph.D.
 • Ime Ukpanah, Ph.D.

Kristin Koptiuch,Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Anthropology

Office: FAB N263
Phone: (602) 543-6031
E-Mail: koptiuch@asu.edu
Web: www.west.asu.edu/koptiuch
 

Education:
Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin

Kristin Koptiuch is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and interdisciplinary Social Sciences. She has also been on the faculty advisory board of Ethnic Studies since its inception. She received her Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin (1989). She is trained in a broad interdisciplinary range of cultural studies and social theory.

Her research and teaching always keeps an eye on race/ethnicity and difference, both in representations and social relations. Her current research on urban culture/social space narrates contemporary cultural, racial, spatial practices of discipline and resistance in Phoenix, an "edge city" precariously perched on three precipices: the transnational political economy, whiteness (racialized spatial restructuring), and the city’s own interior Third World. She has published sociolegal research on the “cultural defense” legal strategy used in criminal cases of gender/sexual violence involving US diaspora Asians, and on the effects of US “third-worlding.” Her first book, A Poetics of Political Economy in Egypt (1999), is based on her research on Egyptian artisans in Cairo. She is a bit of a technophile (http://www.west.asu.edu/koptiuch/), and also tries to practice anthropology as much performance art as social science. For example, for the unit on “subcultures” in her social anthropology course, she created a performance piece called “Lusting for Leopard: Animal Magnetism and the Meaning of Style,” addressing the popularization of animal-skin print and its secret affiliation with shifts in US racial/ethnic identities.

Dr. Koptiuch teaches courses on cultural diversity, urban studies, transnational studies, migration and culture, and social anthropology.