Kelly Askew is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS). She received her B.A. in Music and Anthropology from Yale University (1988) and her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Harvard University (1997). Since 1987, she has pursued extensive fieldwork in East Africa along the Swahili Coast of Tanzania and Kenya on topics relating to music and politics, media, performance, nationalism, socialism, and postsocialism. In addition to academic work, she is actively involved in film and television production, having worked in various capacities on two feature films and a number of documentary films.
2006. “African Socialisms and Postsocialisms” (co-authored with M. Anne Pitcher). Introduction to a special issue entitled “African Postsocialisms.” Africa 76 (1): 1-14.
2006. “Sung and Unsung: Musical Reflections on Tanzanian Postsocialisms,” Africa 76 (1): 15-43.
2006. “Images, Documentation, and Imagined Ethnography,” Michigan Quarterly Review 45 (1): 27-46.
2005. “Jack-of-all-Arts or Ustadhi? The Poetics of Cultural Production in Tanzania.” Pp.304-327 in In Search of a Nation: Histories of Authority and Dissidence in Tanzania, edited by Gregory H. Maddox and James L. Giblin. Oxford: James Currey.
2004. "Striking Samburu and a Mad Cow: Adventures in Anthropollywood."
Pp.31-68 in Off Stage/On Display: Intimacy and Ethnography in the Age of Public Culture, edited by Andrew Shryock. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
2003. "As Plato Duly Warned: Music, Politics, and Social Change in East
Africa," Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 76, No. 4 (Fall 2003): 609-637.
2002. Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2002. The Anthropology of Media: A Reader (co-edited with Richard Wilk).
London and Malden, MA :Blackwell Publishers.
1999 "Female Circles and Male Lines: Transformations in Gender Relations
along the Swahili Coast," Africa Today 46 (3/4): 67-102.
