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Katherine P. Ewing

Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Religion

Professor Ewing is a cultural anthropologist whose field research has led her to Pakistan, Turkey, Germany, and the Triangle area, with stops in India and England.  Before coming to Duke nearly 20 years ago, she got her PhD at the University of Chicago and did several years of training in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.  Her book Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (Duke, 1997) was based on two years of research among Muslim Sufis and their followers in Pakistan, where she hung out at shrines and heard a lot of controversy about the mystical side of Islam.  Her most recent book, Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford, 2008) looks at some of the obstacles to integration facing Germany's large Turkish community.  She is now involved in a project involving research among Muslims in the Triangle area, England, and South Asia that has so far yielded an edited volume, Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the US since 9/11 (Russell Sage, 2008), which includes a chapter co-authored with a Duke undergraduate cultural anthropology major.

At Duke, Kathy teaches undergraduate courses on topics such as fieldwork methods, Culture and Politics of South Asia, Muslims in the West, and Alcohol and Culture.  She is contemplating writing a book based on this course.  She will also be the Director of Graduate Studies in the Cultural Anthropology Department.

Kathy's husband Tom DiPrete is a sociology professor at Columbia University and joins her in Durham as often as he can make the commute.  Her three daughters, Julia (25), Bethany (20), and Justine (18) are all off studying but may be seen around the dorm from time to time.  Julia is at Duke Law School and plans to work for a New York law firm, Bethany is a premed psychology major at Columbia who sings opera, and Justine is interested in the sciences and music (especially saxophones of all sizes) at Stanford. (When Justine does make it to Durham, she is happy to show anyone who is interested how to solve a Rubik's cube in under a minute.)  The family dog Seska (nearly 12) is always around (except when she decides to hang out in the Cultural Anthropology department), and eager for company.  She doesn't like to bark much, but one of her favorite activities is singing to the piano. (Tom does most of the piano playing.)  

Resides Religious movements, Islam, migration, masculinity, Pakistan, Turkey, Europe

212 Science Building
+1 919 684 5170
katherine.ewing@duke.edu