Mark Auslander

Mark Auslander, Ph.D, is a sociocultural and historical anthropologist. He has worked extensively as a scholar and museum professional on experiences of enslavement, racial terror violence. and restorative justice initiatives in Southern Africa and the United States. He served on the faculty curatorial committee of the exhibition “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,” at the Dr Martin Luther King, Jr National Historic Site in Atlanta. Georgia, and on the content development team of African Voices, the major long-running Africa/Diaspora exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural HIstory. Mark’s award-winning book The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (University of Georgia Press, 2011) re-reads American racial politics under slavery and post-slavery through structuralist approaches to mythology and kinship. He is co-editor with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston of the 2021 volume In Search of Lost Futures: Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality, Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography/

Mark has served on the faculty at Mount Holyoke College, Haverford College, Central Washington University, Brandeis University, Emory University/Oxford College, Boston University, UMass Amherst, Emerson College, and Harvard University. He has directed two museums of culture and science, and served as a senior fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. His consultancies include with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Minnesota Institute of Art, The Natural History Museum/Not an Alternative, the World Wildlife Fund, and USAID.

Mark’s BA, MA, and PhD are all from the University of Chicago.

https://markauslander.com/

Mark Auslander’s Selected Publications on Enslavement and Freedom-Making