Mark Auslander

Mark Auslander, PhD, is a Lecturer in Anthropology at UMass-Amherst and Lecturer in Anthropology and the History of Art at Boston University. A sociocultural and historical anthropologist, he has strong interests in museum studies, memory politics, and the cross-cultural study of art and aesthetics in diverse human societies, with an emphasis on the ritual and political dimensions of artistic practice and the arts of Africa and the African Diaspora. He has directed two university museums of science and culture and organized a wide range of exhibitions and installations in art, science, and history. He is the author of the prize-winning book, The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family (University of Georgia Press, 2011); and co-editor, with Magdalena Kazubowski-Houston, of the volume In Search of Lost Futures: Anthropological Explorations in Multimodality, Deep Interdisciplinarity, and Autoethnography (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021)