Narrative Bio: At this time, I look to explore more fully my creative potential in the interest of publicly engaged anthropology. I am author or editor of seven books--the two  latest include a work of intimate ethnography and a graphic novel of art and anthropology with illustrator Charlotte Corden. Teaching at John Jay, a wonderful public institution of higher education, has enabled me to work with fantastic students, many engaging in social justice work and who are transforming the world in important ways.

The accomplishments I'm most pleased with include building our Department of Anthropology community, and designing and launching new projects, not least the major in Anthropology and founding News from the 9^th Floor, our department’s newsletter that features work by students and faculty.  It also includes building programs at John Jay over the years: working with Abby Stein and Caroline Reitz to establish the Vera Fellows Program, the model for the college, working in that program for well over a decade. It includes working years ago with Caroline and Sondra Leftoff to design and implement the Honors Program and its organizing theme, “The Common Good.” It includes establishing the Rising Star Fellowship and working on the JJC Foundation Board to bring new resources—and fellowships—to our students. It includes serving the discipline in multiple capacities such as President, American Anthropological Association (2015-17; VP 2013-15) and chairing the Association’s committee to guide its transition to electronic publishing many years ago.

I am currently Presidential Scholar and Professor of Anthropology Emerita exploring my creative potential and actively engaging with critical issues of our times. Inspired by Gina Ulysse’s call for synthesis—let us not be split between the scholar in us and the responsible global citizen—let us not be split between the anthropologist in us and the artist or poet—I now long for the time and space to venture into new possibilities in communicating knowledge in accessible ways. A recent publication is "Living in and with a Regime of Silencing: Narrative Control and Totalitarian Tendencies since October 7, 2023."

Formal Bio: Alisse Waterston is a cultural anthropologist who studies the human consequences of structural and systemic violence and inequality. Her areas of specialty include urban poverty and policy issues in the U.S. related to destitution, homelessness and substance abuse, health, welfare and migration, and applied policy-related research and writing. Her most recent cross-cultural work focuses on the processes and aftermaths of political violence, ethnic and religious conflict, displacement and transnationalism, remembering, diaspora, cultural trauma and identity formation, issues of enormous importance as we struggle in a world marked by the shadows of war and other forms of violence.

Professor Waterston is author of  the award winning My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory and the Violence of a Century (2024) an intimate ethnography in the Routledge Series on Innovative Ethnographies. She is also author of Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, a graphic book of art and anthropology illustrated by Charlotte Corden and published in the ethnoGRAPHIC series of the University of Toronto Press. Alisse Waterston served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) 2015-2017. She is Series Editor of the Intimate Ethnography series of Berghahn Books, the founding editor of the AAA's public journal, Open Anthropology, tnd she served as editor of North American Dialogue for six years. Her edited volume, Anthropology off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing, with Maria D. Vesperi has proven an important contribution to discussions and debates on "writing culture," the politics of representation, and how to demonstrate the relevance of the discipline to real-world concerns. 

Professor Waterston was International Scholar of the Open Society Institute affiliated with the Gender Studies Department, Tbilisi State University, Republic of Georgia (2012-2015). She is co-editor with Maia Barkaia of Gender in Georgia: Feminist Perspectives on Culture, Nation and History in the South Caucasus (Berghahn Books: 2017; paperback 2020). In 2018, she received the Doctor Honoris Causa, Honorary Doctorate, from Ilia State University in Tblisi, Georgia (2018). 

Professor Waterston is Fellow, Program in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, Sweden