Dr. Catherine Bolten

Professor Bolten is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose interests range from generational friction in modes of labour, education, and agriculture, to multi-species entanglements in rapidly degrading forest-savanna mosaics. She has conducted research in Sierra Leone since 2003, and worked in Botswana from 1996 to 2002. She is currently Director of Doctoral Studies for the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, in addition to teaching and mentoring in the anthropology program. Professor Bolten is also concurrent faculty in the Africana Studies Department, a fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and in the Pulte Institute, and a member of the Eck Institute for Global Health. She is a core faculty member of the Keough School for Global Affairs, which houses the institutes.

Professor Bolten is the author of two books and over a dozen articles and book chapters. Her first book, I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone (University of California Press, 2012) analysed how personal narration of survival during Sierra Leone’s ten-year civil war illuminated a moral and social framework orientated towards care and material investment in others. Her second book, Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Generation and Globalization (Oxford University Press, 2020) analyses how youth orient their schooling, employment, politics, and their dress and comportment around the practices designed to be “taken seriously” by adults.

In 2017 Professor Bolten co-edited a special journal issue on the West African Ebola epidemic in Anthropological Quarterly, a project that was highlighted in the recent best-seller AnthroVision, by Gillian Tett. Her current research is a collaboration with primatologist Andrew Halloran, of Save the Chimps, on the Tonkolili Chimpanzee Project. This project examines chimpanzee survival, conservation, and multi-species entanglements in light of rural food insecurity, overpopulation, climate change, elephant grass desertification, and the recent Ebola epidemic. Dr. Bolten is working on a book from this project tentatively titled Chimpanzees Avoid Rebel Shit: Multi-Species Dwelling in a Troubled Place.