Ann Laura Stoler

Ann Laura Stoler is an American anthropologist and historian, born in 1949, who holds the Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professorship of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School for Social Research in New York, after earlier faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan. Her work examines colonial and postcolonial power, drawing on and extending Michel Foucault's writing on race and sexuality to argue that intimate domains such as sexuality, domesticity and family life were central sites where colonial racial categories and hierarchies were produced and enforced, rather than private matters separate from colonial governance. Her books include Race and the Education of Desire (1995), Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (2002), a study of the Dutch East Indies, and Along the Archival Grain (2009), which reads colonial archives themselves as objects of ethnographic study.