HUGH RAFFLES is Director and Senior Fellow of GIDEST and Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. His work is a sustained ethnographic exploration of relations between humans, animals, and things. At GIDEST, Hugh will be completing his new book, an anthropology of stone that draws on fieldwork in Iceland, Norway, and Scotland to raise questions about the practice of substance, place, and temporality through close accounts of objects that range in scale from landscapes to monuments to pebbles.
Hugh's essays have appeared in a wide variety of venues, including Granta, Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, the New York Times, Cabinet, and Orion. He is the author, most recently, of Insectopedia (Pantheon, 2010), a New York Times Notable Book, and was a recipient of a 2010 Whiting Writers' Award.