Alma Gottlieb is a cultural anthropologist. She earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College in anthropology and French (1975), and her MA (1978) and PhD (1983) in cultural anthropology from the University of Virginia. Among other works, she is the author or editor of A World of Babies: Imagined Guides for Eight Societies (2016), The Afterlife Is Where We Come from: The Culture of Infancy in West Africa (2004), and Under the Kapok Tree: Identity and Difference in Beng Thought (1992); the co-author (with Philip Graham) of Braided Worlds (2012) and Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa (1993--winner of the Victor Turner Award/Society for Humanistic Anthropology); the editor of The Restless Anthropologist (2012); and the co-editor of Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (1988--winner of the Most Enduring Edited Collection Award/Council for the Anthropology of Reproduction) and A World of Babies: Imagined Childcare Guides for Eight Societies (2017).
From 1983-2016, Gottlieb taught anthropology, women's studies, and African studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is now Professor Emerita; she has also been a visiting professor and researcher at Princeton University, Brown University, the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium), the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), the Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Políticas (Lisbon), the National University of Côte d'Ivoire (Abidjan), Lewis and Clark College (Portland), and elsewhere.
Her major field research has been among the Beng people of Côte d'Ivoire and, more recently, among Cape Verdeans with Jewish heritage (on and off the islands).
A past president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, her research has been funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, and other agencies.
View her website here: almagottlieb.com
