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Noah Tamarkin

(he/him)
Research Associate, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand and Associate Professor of Anthropology and Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University

I am a cultural anthropologist and STS scholar with a research focus on political and legal anthropology, race, the social politics of genetics, and South Africa. At Cornell University, I have a dual appointment in anthropology and science & technology studies and I am also affiliated with feminist gender and sexuality studies, LGBT studies, and Jewish studies. I am also a research associate at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Experience

  • 2023–present
    Associate professor, Cornell University
  • 2020–2023
    Assistant professor, Cornell University
  • 2014–2020
    Assistant professor, Ohio State University
  • 2012–2013
    Postdoctoral fellow, University of Pennsylvania

Education

  • 2011 
    University of California Santa Cruz, PhD Cultural Anthropology, designated emphasis in Feminist Studies

Publications

  • 2024
    After Race Classification: Grappling with South African Indigenous DNA in Practice, in Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science, edited by Dorothy Roberts, Eram Alam, and Natalie Shibley
  • 2023
    Legislating Forensic Genetics in South Africa: Science, Justice, and the Occlusion of Race in Postapartheid DNA Databasing, in Law, Practice and Politics of Forensic DNA Profiling: Forensic Genetics and Their Technolegal Worlds, edited by Victor Toom, Amade M’Charek, and Mattias Wienroth
  • 2022
    Afterword: Data, Life, and Worlds in an Anthropology of Bioinformation, in Bioinformation: Worlds and Futures, edited by Silvia Posocco and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo
  • 2020
    Genetic Afterlives: Black Jewish Indigeneity in South Africa, Duke University Press
  • 2019
    Forensics and Fortification in South African Self-Captivity, History and Anthropology
  • 2018
    Time and Relational Possibility: Cultural Anthropology in 2017, American Anthropologist
  • 2017
    Engagements with Decolonization and Decoloniality in and at the Interfaces of STS (co-authored with Kristina Lyons and Juno Parrenas, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience
  • 2015
    Jewish Genetics, Oxford Bibliographies in Jewish Studies
  • 2014
    Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa, Cultural Anthropology
  • 2014
    African Indigenous Citizenship (co-authored with Rachel Giraudo), in The Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, edited by Engin F. Isin and Peter Nyers
  • 2011
    Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy: Lemba ‘Black Jews’ in South Africa, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science