Nina Sylvanus
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Nina Sylvanus is a political and economic anthropologist whose work centers on capital and labor, value and aesthetics, infrastructure and technology, and, more broadly, critical transformations in the neoliberal global economy. Her regional specialism is West Africa, specifically China-in-Africa, and its impact on the world at large. Sylvanus received her doctoral training in Anthropology and African Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA before taking up her first teaching position in the Anthropology Department at Reed College. She joined Northeastern in 2010. Sylvanus is the author of Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender and Materiality in West Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2016), a study of the dense materiality and rich signifying qualities of African print cloth – which, she shows, offers a cogent theoretical and methodological frame for understanding colonial and postcolonial patterns of value production and exchange. She is currently working on a book, Harboring the Future: The Togo Techno-Port, Governance, and Global Economics in West Africa, on the emergence of new ports, new logistic infrastructures, and the new maritime anthropology of West Africa. This study explores, simultaneously, the workings of global corporations in Africa, their relations to the contemporary state, and the predicament of proletarian labor in the history of the African present.
2018 (summer) Sai Wai-Kin Junior Fellowship, University of Hong Kong
2017-2018 Northeastern University, Research Development Grant
2012-2013 NSF/Advance Mentorship Grant, Northeastern University;
2011-2012 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for the Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape
2009 Summer Research Grant, Dean of Faculty, Reed College;
2006-2008 Global Fellow (Postdoctoral Fellowship), International Institute, University of California, Los Angeles
Sylvanus, Nina. 2026. “China for exPort: Africa and the Global Maritime,” Critical Asian Studies, Special Series: “New Directions in Africa-China Studies,” Commentary Board, January 22. https://doi.org/10.52698/RPLQ9235.
Sylvanus, Nina. 2023. Un port ancré dans l’histoire, une histoire ancrée: Circulations, passé et present.” Anthropologie et Dévelopment 54: 183-202. https://doi.org/10.4000/anthropodev.2418.
Sylvanus, Nina. 2022. “Privatizing the Port: Harboring Neoliberalism in Lomé.” In Transport Corridors in Africa, edited by Paul Nugent and Hugh Lamarque. Boydell and Brewer, pp. 155-179. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781800104761-010.
Sylvanus, Nina. 2019. “Conspicuously Public: Gendered Histories of Sartorial and Social Success in Urban Togo. In Conspicuous Consumption in Africa, edited by Deborah Posel and Ilana Van Wyk. Wits University Press, pp. 45-62. http://doi.org/10.18772/22019053641.
Sylvanus, Nina. 2017. “Real/Fake: Brands, Labels, and China in West Africa.” In African-Print Fashion Now: A Story of Taste, Globalization, and Style, edited by Fowler Museum, UCLA, pp. 106-113.
Sylvanus, Nina. 2016. Patterns in Circulation: Cloth, Gender and Materiality in West Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo25126083.html.
Association for African Studies
Association of American Anthropology
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Education
PhD, Anthropology
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, 2006 -
Contact
617.373.4270 [email protected] -
Address
220A RP
360 Huntington Avenue
Boston, MA 02115 -
Office Hours
Wednesdays 2:00 - 4:00pm
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Consumer Cultures
ANTH 3120
Introduces students to anthropological theories of consumption and debates about the “social life of things.” Explores the politics invested in material objects ranging from hijab fashions in Teheran to forms of global hipsterism, debates about nationalism and commodity cultures, as well as the political economy of production and consumption. Includes, but is not limited to, commodity fetishism, value, social/cultural capital, distinction, neoliberalism, consumerism, and materiality.
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Global Markets and Local Cultures
ANTH 2305
Examines selected topics in the socioeconomic transformation of other cultures, including urbanization, industrialization, globalization, commodity production, and international labor migration. Focuses on the impact of global capitalist development on contemporary developing and postcolonial societies as well as local responses and/or resistances to those changes.
Foundations of Anthropological Theory
ANTH 3421
Introduces the foundations of anthropological theory. Examines recurring themes surrounding structure and agency, culture and power, and the tension between the individual and society. Addresses these questions by returning to anthropology’s Enlightenment roots, early evolutionary thought, classic and contemporary theories, as well as ongoing critiques of the discipline. Explores different schools of thought, including functionalism, structural functionalism, symbolism, interpretivism, and more recent theoretical developments that address history, political economy, reflexivity, poststructuralism, and feminism, as well as transnational/global and activist approaches.
