Top of page
Skip to main content
Main content

Carla FreemanDirector, Fox Center for Humanistic InquiryGoodrich C. White Professor of WGSS

Carla Freeman is the Goodrich C. White Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, associated faculty in Anthropology and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Emory and Director of the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. She served from 2014-2020 as Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Executive Associate Dean, and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty. Freeman earned her AB in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr College in 1983 and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Temple University in 1993. 

Freeman's research examines the culture, gender, and political economy of labor and globalization, the changing nature of work/life in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the growing role of affect and emotion across market and non-market economies. A feminist anthropologist with over thirty years of fieldwork experience in the Caribbean, her publications include three books: High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy (Duke University Press, 2000), Entrepreneurial Selves (Duke University Press, 2014) and Global Middle Classes (with Rachel Heiman and Mark Liechty, SAR Press). She has published in such journals as American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Anthropology, Signs: Journal of Women, Culture and Society, Feminist Studies, and Critique of Anthropology. Freeman’s research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Fulbright, and the OAS. She is the past President of the Association for Feminist Anthropology and the editor (with Li Zhang, UC-Davis) of Oxford University Press’ series of contemporary ethnography, "Issues of Globalization." 

She is engaged in new research on the method and writing of ethnography and biography, and the life of Caribbean scholar-activist Peggy Antrobus.  

For selected publications: https://emory.academia.edu/CarlaFreeman 

Video: "On Academic Failure"

Interview about Entrepreneurial Selves.