UK, US, South Africa
Cultural Anthropology, African Studies, Political Economy, History of Capitalism, Marxism, Anthropology of Finance, Anthropology of South Africa, Cities, Urbanism.
I chose to come to teach at VIU because I teach and conduct research on questions relevant to the VIU globalization track, mostly about processes of economic globalization and integration, plus I had NEVER visited Italy until the opportunity to teach at VIU came about. So how could I pass on an opportunity, not only to be in Italy, but in Venice in particular?!
Unfortunately, I had a very short experience at VIU, I was only briefly in Venice before the COVID-19 outbreak and then had to leave to return to the US. But in that short time, I fell in love with Venice—with the labyrinthine streets, the campi, and calli, the little outlying islands, the canals, and so on. I love that Venice is a walking city and Venetians take their time to have a morning espresso, to walk their dogs, to stop and speak with a neighbor. VIU, based on San Servolo Island, brings so many different kinds of people together. The students are from many countries, cultures, and language backgrounds. It’s a great pleasure to teach them and to feel involved in something genuinely cosmopolitan.
I think this is a great opportunity for all professors, for all the reasons I cited above, but of course especially because the program is based in Italy and because local administrators and faculty are welcoming and generous. They also communicate to visitors a sense of sheer joy at living a kind of experiment, i.e. a city on a Lagoon.
Meet the students and you will be pleasantly surprised by the response - the expansive views, stimulating conversations, and unique perspectives. This is the feedback that you will receive teaching to international students.
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Prof. Makhulu taught at VIU in Spring 2020 the following courses:
A History of Credit: From Sixteenth-Century Venice to Twenty-First Century New York City
African Cities, Development and Climate Change
Short bio
Anne Maria B. Makhulu, Duke University
BA in Anthropology (Columbia), MA and PhD in Anthropology (Chicago). Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology and African and African American Studies at Duke. Her research interests cover: Africa and more specifically South Africa, cities, space, globalization, political economy, neoliberalism, the anthropology of finance and corporations, as well as questions of aesthetics, including the literature of South Africa. Makhulu is co-editor of Hard Work, Hard Times: Global Volatility and African Subjectivities (2010) and the author of Making Freedom: Apartheid, Squatter Politics, and the Struggle for Home (2015). She is a contributor to Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age (2004), New Ethnographies of Neoliberalism (2010), author of articles in "Anthropological Quarterly" and ""PMLA, special issue guest editor for "South Atlantic Quarterly" (115(1)) and special theme section guest editor for "Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East" (36(2)). A new project, South Africa After the Rainbow (in preparation), examines the relationship between race and mobility in postapartheid South Africa and has been supported with an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
