Catherine Lutz
Thomas J. Watson, Jr. Family Professor of International Studies
Professor of Anthropology
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.
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.
Re-Examining Global Policy Agendas via Interactive, South-Initiated North-South Dialogues
Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in Peacekeeping
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.
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.
July 8, 2020 Defense One
This article features commentary from Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford, who lead the Costs of War project based at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
June 26, 2020 Politico
In this article, Catherine Lutz offered commentary on COVID-19 deaths.
June 8, 2020 The Boston Globe
Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford in the Boston Globe, "We can finance public education, public health, and high-quality veterans care. But, to do so, we have to reduce the Pentagon budget, invest in the programs actually keeping us safe and end the post-9/11 wars."
May 28, 2020 The Intercept
This article cites the recent essay co-authored by Catherine Lutz on normalizing COVID-19 deaths.
May 11, 2020 Washington Post
This column references a recent essay written by Catherine Lutz on the dangers of normalizing COVID-19 deaths.
May 5, 2020
Catherine Lutz is the co-director of Brown University's Costs of War Project and Anne Lutz Fernandez is an English teacher. They are the co-authors of Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives.
April 13, 2020 Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
In this interview, Catherine Lutz explains why we need to fundamentally rethink what national security means so it can focus civilian solutions toward very real societal risks many are currently experiencing.
4:30 p.m. – 6 p.m. Start time has changed to 4:30. Register here to join the webinar, or click below on watch webcast to view live on Watson's YouTube channel.
Global Anti-Black Racism, Watson Distinguished Speaker Series
2 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer Street