Saida Hodžić, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University

Saida Hodžić, associate professor of Anthropology and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, studies women’s rights activism, NGO advocacy, humanitarianism, and civic environmental activism. Her first book, The Twilight of Cutting: African Activism and Life after NGOs (University of California Press, 2017) has won the Michelle Rosaldo Book Prize by the Association for Feminist Anthropology, granted to a first book that embodies the theoretical rigor, ethnographic richness and advancement of feminist scholarship, as well as the Amaury Talbot Book Prize for African Anthropology by the Royal Anthropological Institute. She is currently working on two book manuscripts, Affective Encounters: Humanitarian Afterlives of War and Violence and For Whom is Africa Rising? Unsettling Transnational Feminism in the 21st Century.

She received the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship for Humanists and Social Scientists from the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell as well as the Rosenthal Advancement of College of Arts and Sciences Women Faculty Award. She has been a faculty fellow at the Cornell Society for the Humanities and at the Institute for Social Science. She is also a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Research Grant and the Diane Forsythe Dissertation Award for Social Studies of Science, Technology, and Health.

Her courses on the intersections of feminism, global health, human rights, governance, and engaged anthropology address pressing political concerns and pay equal attention to critical theory, ethnographic inquiry, intersectional analysis, and movements for social justice. Recent courses include “Politics Beyond the State: Activism, Advocacy, and NGOs,” “Humanitarian Affects,” “A Global Controversy: How to Study a Human Rights Violation,” “Drugs and Social Justice,” and “Gender, Liberalism, and Postcolonial Theory.”