Mariane C. Ferme

I received my PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, after studying Political Science at the University of Milano, Italy, and majoring in anthropology at Wellesley College.  I have held fellowships at the Carter Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, and University College, London.  In addition to teaching at UC-Berkeley, I have held appointments at the University of Cambridge, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, and the Jacques Leclerq Chair at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

My research has long focused on Sierra Leone, and West Africa more generally.  I have moved from phenomenological approaches to gendered spheres of activity and objects to, more recently, a focus on the political imagination in times of violence, particularly in relation to the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone. I am interested in how modern Africans in situations of crisis harness history in the deployment of particular figures and symbols of the political.  My work on transitional justice mechanisms has taken me to do comparative research on the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania.  This work has included raising questions of translation, evidence, and comparative legal discourses in court settings and beyond.

An incipient research project on the politics and practices of garbage management in rapidly growing global cities—particularly Cairo, Egypt—revisits in part my earlier interest in material culture, as well as building on more recent concerns with political cultures.