Laurian Bowles

Laurian Bowles is an Associate Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Davidson College. She serves as the Vann Professor of Racial Justice and directs the Davidson in Ghana Program. Her academic work bridges Africana Studies, anthropology, and gender studies, focusing on the intersection of social mobility, visual economies of labor, and racialized identities.

• Education: Ph.D. in Anthropology, Temple University
• M.A. in Anthropology of Media, SOAS, University of London
• B.A. in African American Studies and Journalism, Pennsylvania State University

Her research explores:

• The social and visual dynamics of women's labor in Ghana and the African Diaspora.
• How race, class, and queerness are constructed through visual storytelling.
• Antiblackness and queer sexual politics in the context of feminized labor and modernity.

She has published in Feminist Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, The Journal of African History, and African Arts. Her book Headstrong: Women Porters, Blackness and Modernity in Accra (Penn Press, 2025) synthesizes a decade of fieldwork on women porters in Ghana, interrogating state and societal notions of progress through the lens of antiblackness, queer sexuality, and gendered labor.

As Chair of Anthropology, she oversees departmental leadership and curriculum development. Her teaching portfolio includes courses on African feminisms, decolonizing anthropological theory, and the visual haptic nature of photographs in social contexts.