Elizabeth L. Krause

For the past fifteen years, Elizabeth L. Krause has worked as an ethnographer, writer, and educator. Her research interests include reproductive politics, social memory, economic anthropology, immigration, ethnographic writing, and methods of local-global encounters. She is professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and author of the blurred genre _Unraveled: A Weaver’s Tale of Life Gone Modern_ (University of California Press, 2009) as well as the ethnography _A Crisis of Births: Population Politics and Family-Making in Italy_ (Thomson-Wadsworth 2005). Her paper, “They Just Happened”: The Curious Case of the Unplanned Baby, Italian Low Fertility, and the “End” of Rationality, published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, won the Polgar Prize for best article from the Society for Medical Anthropology (2013). She is currently working on two collaborative research projects: one focuses on Chinese immigrants working in Italy’s fast-fashion sector to examine questions of value, well-being, and global families; the other makes use of a participant-based method of digital storytelling with young parenting Latinas in Massachusetts. In 2013-14, she was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, where she worked on the book manuscript, “Tight Knit: A Biography of Globalization.” Her research has received support from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Council for European Studies, The Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.