Faculty

Melissa Fisher, Ph.D., is a cultural anthropologist whose research addresses inequality and belonging within modern institutions, examining how shifting values around labor, family, and success manifest in everyday organizational environments. She currently serves on the part-time faculty in both the Strategic Design and Management program and the Interior Design program at Parsons School of Design, The New School, where she is also an affiliated faculty member at the Center for the American Experience.   Author of Wall Street Women (Duke University Press, 2012) and co-editor of Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press, 2006), her current book project explores how architects and designers shape post-pandemic environments. Specifically, her research examines how redesigned physical and digital workplace landscapes—alongside AI-driven algorithmic power—are reshaping the meaning of work, place, and identity.   Named one of AVUITY’s 2025 Top 65 CRE and Work Tech Experts to Follow on LinkedIn, Dr. Fisher is a sought-after speaker and advisor. Her insights have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Work Design Magazine, and she maintains long-standing advisory partnerships with JLL, Batten & Company (Omnicom), and CFAR Consulting. She is also a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge.   Previously the Laurits Andersen Professor of Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, she has held full-time faculty appointments at Georgetown and NYU. Early training in postmodern dance, performance, and graphic design in NYC deeply informs her anthropological practice—bridging people, place, movement, and design. She holds a B.A. in English, Theater and Dance from Barnard College, an M.A. in Dance and Movement from Wesleyan University, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University.  

Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, Columbia University

Masters in Dance and Movement, Welseyan University

B.A. cum laude in English, with Honors, Barnard College, Columbia University

Melissa Fisher, “Workplace anthropologist – the missing member of the workplace design team “Work and Place. November, 2025

Fisher, Melissa, Flore Pradere, Diana Nait-Belkacem, Borja Ruiz de Castaneda and Steven Lewis, "The Omnipresence Challenge: enabling sustainable performance in the ‘always on’ era," JLL Corporate Real Estate, October 14, 2025.

Melissa Fisher and Hana Kassem, "“The Third Place Incorporated: An Anthropological-Architectural Approach to Fostering Community in the Workplace," Work Design Magazine, June 5, 2025.

Melissa Fisher, and Hana Kassem, “Workplace Redux: An Anthropological Approach to Today’s Workplace Design,” Work Design Magazine. September 21, 2023

Melissa Fisher, “Charting the Future of Business and Organizational Ethnography,” Journal of Organizational Ethnography, Special 10^th Anniversary Issue (Fall/Winter 2021). Pp. 369-80.

Jannick Friis Christensen, Sarah Dunne, Melissa Fisher, Alexander Fleischmann, Mary McGill, Florence Villesèche, Marta Natalia Wróblewska, “Toward Powerful Queer-Feminist Academic Writing, “Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organizations 18.4. (April 2018), pp. 865–79.

Melissa Fisher , “White Corporate Feminine Spirituality: The Rise of Global Professional Women’s Conferences in the New Millennium” in Ethnographies of Conferences and Trade Fairs: Shaping Industries, Creating Professionals, edited by Anette Nyqvist and Hege Høyer Leivestad. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 43–63.

Melissa Fisher, Claudia Nessous, and Anna Perrottet, “’Fashion Is Political?!’ Sustainable Fashion and Entrepreneurial Feminisms in Berlin,” Femina Politica (August 2017), pp. 127–35.

Melissa Fisher, “Building Alternative Feminist Economic Futures: WHEELS,” Globalizations, special issue, Feminist Global Political Economy of the Everyday, edited by Adrienne Roberts and Juanita Elias (March 2016), pp. 908–11. Reprinted in Feminist Global Economies of the Everyday, edited by Adrienne Roberts and Juanita Elias. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Melissa Fisher, “Wall Street Women: Professional Saviors of the Global Economy,” Critical Perspectives in International Business, special issue, Critical Perspectives on the Globally Mobile Professional and Managerial Class, 11. 2 (May 2015), pp. 137–55, https://doi.org/10.1108/cpoib-11-2012-0054

Melissa Fisher, “Wall Street Women on Film,” Public Books (September 1, 2016), https://wwww.publicbooks.org/wall-street-women-on-film.