Dianna Shandy

Dianna Shandy is Professor of Anthropology. During her more than two decades at Macalester, Professor Shandy has taught and held a number of leadership positions. Currently, she is serving as Interim Dean of the Faculty. She was a 2019-2020 American Council on Education (ACE) fellow in the President’s Office at Elon University. She has served as department chair, associate dean in the Kofi Annan Institute for Global Citizenship, and as Director of African Studies at Macalester.

Shandy has served as visiting faculty at the University of Cape Town in the Macalester-Pomona-Swarthmore Program in South Africa, as an African Diaspora Expert Fellow at the Offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, and as an Executive Leadership Fellow at the Center for Integrative Leadership, University of Minnesota. Shandy serves as Gender Equity Seat on the Members’ Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee (MPAAC) of the American Anthropological Association, where she was co-lead in writing the 2018 Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assault Policy and co-recipient of the 2018 American Anthropological Association Gender Equity Award. She has been past-president, president, and vice president of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM), program co-chair for the African Studies Association Annual Meeting, and has served on the boards of Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, International Migration, Bildhaan: A Journal of Somali Studies, Africa Network, and the Forced Migration Upward Mobility Project.

Shandy graduated from Georgetown University with a B.S. in Languages and Certificates in Russian Areas Studies and African Studies, and received an M.A. in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and an MPhil. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in New York City. Her work spans U.S. and international settings, with research and teaching interests in migration and refugees; humanitarianism; gender; and African and African Diaspora Studies.  Her books include: Conformity and Conflict:  A Reader in Cultural Anthropology, 15th Edition (with David McCurdy and James Spradley, 2016); Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples: What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us About Work and Family (with Karine Moe, 2010); Nuer-American Passages: Globalizing Sudanese Migration (2007); The Cultural Experience: Ethnography in Complex Society, 2nd Ed. (with David McCurdy and James Spradley, 2005), and Rethinking Refuge and Displacement (with Elzbieta Gozdziak.) She is the author of more than 15 peer reviewed articles and 35 other publications.

Recent courses she has taught include: Gender, Power, and Sexualities in Africa; Writing Human Rights; Race, Racism, Decolonization: Lessons from South Africa; Refugees and Humanitarian Response; Ethnographic Interviewing; Cultural Anthropology; Senior Seminar; Culture and Globalization; and Life Histories, Cultures, Selves. She also teaches a course in French, “The Language of Diplomacy,” with French Professor Juliette Rogers, that explores questions of vocation and international public service and includes a program in The Hague, Geneva, Marseille, and Paris to visit the institutions engaged in the course.