Tooker, Deborah E., (Ph.D. 1988, Harvard University) is professor of anthropology, department of anthropology, criminology, and sociology at Le Moyne College. Her research focuses on the anthropology of space and place and identity concepts/politics in upland/lowland relationships in Thailand, especially among the Akha. She is currently working on historical changes in emotional practices and concepts of self among the Akha.

Dr. Tooker has conducted long-term fieldwork among the Akha of Northern Thailand/Burma (Myanmar) and short-term fieldwork among these same people in Yunnan, China. Her most recent publication is a book titled: Space and the Production of Cultural Difference among the Akha Prior to Globalization: Channeling the Flow of Life. 2012. Amsterdam University Press (distributed in the US by the University of Chicago Press).

She has also published in the journals Man, Journal of Asian Studies, Anthropological Quarterly, and Cambridge Anthropology. Before coming to Le Moyne in 1992, Professor Tooker taught at Harvard University and held a Rockefeller Resident Fellowship at Cornell University. She also held a research fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden, The Netherlands, in 1994-96. Prof. Tooker is also a Faculty Associate in Research with Cornell University’s Southeast Asia Program.  At Le Moyne, she teaches introductory anthropology, critical ethnography, anthropological linguistics, social theory, and Southeast Asian cultures.