Brooke Schwartz Bocast, PhD
Assistant Professor
About
Brooke Schwartz Bocast is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and affiliate faculty in the African Studies minor.
An interdisciplinary scholar, she works at the intersections of anthropology, African studies, gender and sexuality studies, and broadly across the humanities. Her debut monograph, If Books Fail, Try Beauty: Educated Womanhood in the New East Africa (Oxford University Press 2024) was awarded the Council on Anthropology and Education's Outstanding Book Award.
She currently researches and organizes with diaspora activists in Uganda’s National Unity Platform/People Power Freedom Movement. By tackling questions around transnational solidarities, fissures, and mediated presences this project offers a unique vantage onto opposition political praxis in an era of rising global authoritarianism.
Dr. Bocast's research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and the Institute for International Education. Her writing appears in City & Society, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Anthropology & Humanism, and other scholarly, literary, and public venues.
Current Courses
HUMA 290 Popular Culture in sub-Saharan Africa
HUMA 290 Contemporary Africa: Sex and Power