Faculty

Profile

**On leave Spring 2025**

Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research. Stoler is the director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. She taught at the University of Michigan from 1989-2003 and has been at the New School for Social Research since 2004, where she was the founding chair of its revitalized Anthropology Department. She has worked for some thirty years on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and ethnography of the archives. She has been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études, the École Normale Supérieure and Paris 8, Cornell University’s School of Criticism and Theory, Birzeit University in Ramallah,  the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism, Irvine’s School of Arts and Literature, and the Bard Prison Initiative. She is the recipient of NEH, Guggenheim, NSF, SSRC, and Fulbright awards, among others. Recent interviews with her are available at Savage Minds, Le Monde, and Public Culture, Itinerario, Dis(Closures), as well as Pacifica Radio.

Her books include Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (1985; 1995) Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (2002, 2010), Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2009) and Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (2016), as well as.the edited volumes Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (with Frederick Cooper, 1997), Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (2006), Imperial Formations (with Carole McGranahan and Peter Perdue, 2007) and Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (2013) and Thinking with Balibar (Fordham 2020), edited with Jacques Lezra, and Stathis Gourgourias.  Her commitment to joining conceptual and historical research has lead to collaborative work with historians, literary scholars and philosophers, and most recently in the creation of the journal Political Concepts: A Critical Lexicon, of which she is one of the founding editors.

Professor Stoler is the Founding Director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI)

Degrees Held

PhD 1982, Columbia University

Recent Publications

• Interior Frontiers: Essays on the Entrails of Inequality (Oxford University Press, 2022)
• Thinking with Balibar, A Lexicon of Conceptual Practice (Fordham University Press, 2020) ed. with Stathis Gourgouris, and Jacques Lezra.
• Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times, (Duke University Press, 2016)
• Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Duke University Press, 2013)
• "An Interview with Ann Laura Stoler by E. Valentine Daniel," Public Culture 24:3 (2012) 
• Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton Universitry Press, 2009)
• Imperial Formations (School for Advanced Research Press, 2007)
• Haunted by Empire: Geographies of the Intimate in North American History (Duke University Press, 2006)
• Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (University of California Press, 2002)
• Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (University of California Press, 1997)
• Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Duke University Press, 1995)
• Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1979 (University of Michigan Press, 1985)

Performances and Appearances

May 2020 - Great Books 31: Truth and Knowledge for Michel Foucault, with Ann Stoler (podcast)

Research Interests

Colonial cultures; critical race theory;  political economy; historical methodologies; Southeast Asia; politics of knowledge; histories of sentiment & sexuality; historical ethnography,"fieldwork in philosophy."