Ruth Behar

Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies Ph.D. and MA in Cultural Anthropology, Princeton University B.A. in Letters, Wesleyan University

Contact Information:
Anthropology
228-A West Hall
1092
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107
734.936.0365
Fax: 763.6077
Email: rbehar@umich.edu

Website:
http://www.ruthbehar.com/

Biography: Ruth Behar is Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies.  Her research as an anthropologist has taken her to Spain and Mexico, where she has carried out research on agrarian life, popular religion, and women's self-narratives. Her first book, The Presence of the Past: Santa Maria del Monte, was published by Princeton University Press in 1986 and issued in 1991 in a revised paperback edition. Her second book, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Beacon Press 1993), focuses on the life history of a Mexican woman street peddler, which is set within an innovative feminist, experimental theoretical framework. She co-edited Women Writing Culture (University of California Press, 1995) and edited Bridges to Cuba/Puentes a Cuba (University of Michigan, 1995). Her book of essays, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Beacon Press, 1996) combines ethnographic criticism with autobiographic criticism in unusual ways that challenge traditional genres of reporting information. In 1988 Behar was named MacArthur Fellow and in 1995 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.  Most recently she produced and directed Adio Kerida Goodbye Dear Love, a personal documentary about the search for identity and memory among Sephardic Jews.  Her latest book is An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba (Rutgers University Press, 2007). She has also co-edited, with Lucia Suarez, The Portable Island: Cubans at Home in the World (Palgrave, 2008).