Biography
Professor Lutz is the author or co-author of many books and articles on a range of issues, including security and militarization, gender violence, education, and transportation. Writing and speaking widely in a variety of media, she has also consulted with civil society organizations as well as with the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the government of Guam. She is past president of the American Ethnological Society and was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow and a Radcliffe Fellow.
Research
Professor Lutz's research has focused on the transformations of war, as well as on peacekeeping and gender, military basing and anti-basing social movements, photographic representations of the world of nations, and car cultures and political economy.
She is currently leading a large interdisciplinary project on the human, social, and financial costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Costs of War project has brought together over 45 scholars and practitioners from across the social sciences with expertise in these areas, and their research output is available at costsofwar.org.
Current Projects
Re-Examining Global Policy Agendas via Interactive, South-Initiated North-South Dialogues
Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Peacekeeping
Costs of War
Publications
The Brightest Will Rise, and Other Errors. Cultural Anthropology Fieldsites, no. February 2018, 02/01/2018, Peer Reviewed, Published.
Bureaucratic Weaponry and the Production of Ignorance in Military Operations on Guam. Current Anthropology, vol. 60, no. S19, 12/01/2018, Peer Reviewed, Published.
War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New York: New York University Press, in press (edited with Andrea Mazzarino).
The Politics and Aesthetics of Military Maps. In Securing Spaces. Setha Low and Mark Maguire, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2018, in press.
Roboeducation. In Robo-Humans: How Algorithms are Remaking Social Life, Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018, in press (with Anne Fernandez).
Afterword: Producing States of Security. Anthropological Theory, 2017, 17 (3): 421-25.
What Matters. Cultural Anthropology, 2017, 32 (2): 181-191.
Schooled: Ordinary, Extraordinary Teaching in an Age of Change (with Anne Fernandez). New York: Teachers College Press, 2015.
The U.S. Car Colossus and the Production of Inequality. American Ethnologist, 2014, 41 (2): 232-45.
Talks & Media
The War in Afghanistan Might Not Be Effective -- But For Some, It's Profitable. Pacific Standard, September 6, 2017.
How Did Guam Become a Target of North Korean Missiles? Common Dreams, August 18, 2017.
Trump’s Budget Puts Lives at Risk. US News and World Report, May 23, 2017, with William Hartung.
Donald Trump and US Foreign Policy. Okinawa Times, November 14, 2016.
What the People of the United States Need to Know about their Bases in Okinawa. Ryukyu Shimpo, March 15, 2015.
US Reconstruction Aid for Afghanistan is Focused on Weapons; Much is Siphoned Off by Corruption. Global Post, February 13, 2015.
Review of Ian Morris, “War: What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots.” San Francisco Chronicle, July 14, 2014.
News|Recent News
November 18, 2019
Digital Journal
Cited in Digital Journal, "The two reports were prepared by the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Catherine Lutz, Costs of War co-director and a Brown Professor who authored the projects' report on deaths said: "These reports provide a reminder that even if fewer soldiers are dying and the U.S. is spending a little less on the immediate costs of war today, the financial impact is still as bad as, or worse than, it was 10 years ago."
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November 13, 2019
The Hill
Cited in The Hill, "As horrible as the wars’ impacts are in this country, a new report released today by Brown University’s Costs of War project shows that the magnitude of death, injury and trauma in the countries where the United States has fought its wars is far worse."
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October 7, 2019
Providence Journal
Catherine Lutz co-authors a piece in the Providence Journal, "Above all, the Afghanistan war has failed to achieve its goals."
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April 26, 2019
U.S. News & World Report
Professor Cathy Lutz comments on the number of security contractors that the U.S. military employs in Afghanistan, saying "The main problem with contractors of all sorts is there's just not enough attention to what they're doing. That's not been reported out in a clear way to anybody's satisfaction for all these years."
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May 23, 2018
Catherine Lutz, co-director of the Watson Institute’s Costs of War project, responds to President Trump’s repeated claim that the United States "has spent $7 trillion in the Middle East."
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March 21, 2018
C-SPAN
During a Senate debate on the Yemen War Powers Resolution on March 20, 2018, lawmakers discussed the extent of U.S. force abroad and Congress's role in making decisions about where the U.S. goes to war. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) cited new Brown University Costs of War project data showing that the U.S. is taking military action against terrorism in 76 countries. "How often," he asked, "has Congress debated whether those military actions were authorized?"
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March 21, 2018
NPR
Catherine Lutz, a professor of anthropology, called National Geographic's past coverage "a kind of white view of the world ... it's safe, and it's basically free of problems." The magazine's forthcoming issue will confront its own racist past.
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