Janet RoitmanPh.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1996
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Profile:Janet Roitman received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to the New School, she served as an instructor at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques de Paris (Sciences-po). She was likewise a research fellow with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a member of the Institut Marcel-Mauss (CNRS-EHESS) in Paris.
Professor Roitman has conducted extensive research in Central Africa, focusing specifically on the borders of Cameroon, Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Chad. Her book, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press, 2005), is an analysis of the unregulated commerce that transpires on those borders. This research inquires into emergent forms of economic regulation in the region of the Chad Basin and considers consequential transformations in the nature of fiscal relations and citizenship. More generally, her research covers topics of political economy, the anthropology of value, economization, and emergent forms of the political.
Her current research project, entitled “Anti-Crisis” (Duke University Press, forthcoming) inquires into the status of the concept of crisis in the social sciences, a project she has developed with the support of the Institute for Public Knowledge, New York University, where she was a scholar-in-residence from 2010-11.
Anti-Crisis, Duke University Press, forthcoming.
“Africa, Otherwise” in C. Piot, Obarrio, J. and B. Goldstone, eds. African Futures, Duke University Press, forthcoming (2012).
“Crisis”, in Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon (Tel Aviv, New York), 2012: http://www.politicalconcepts.org/2011/crisis
Guest Editor, Racial France, special issue of Public Culture, 23, 1, February 2011.
“The Efficacy of the Economy”, African Studies Review 50.2, 2007, pp.155-161.
“The Ethics of Illegality in the Chad Basin” in Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, dirs. Law and
Disorder in the Postcolony, University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa, Princeton University Press, 2005.
“Modes of Governing : the Garrison-Entrepot” in A. Ong and S. Collier, eds. Global Anthropology :
Technology, Politics, and Ethicsas Athnropological Problems, Blackwell, 2005.
