Lou Brown

I am Senior Research Scholar and Director of Programs for the Forum for Scholars and Publics at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, I have worked in Madagascar, Nepal, and the United States conducting original research and facilitating multidisciplinary public engagement. My teaching, research and public engagement work has increasingly explored the relationship between place, sensory experience, archives, and the creation of individual and collective meaning. My recent publications draw on research conducted as part of a multi-sited collective of researchers exploring the everyday material manifestations of COVID-19. I am also a lead researcher on “Archives and Creative Process: Blues Women and Rosetta Records,” a project at Duke University that convenes a multidisciplinary group to find and tell the stories of the women whose music was produced and distributed through Rosetta Records. My work has been funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, Fulbright IIE, the Russell Sage Foundation, and various internal grants at Washington University in St. Louis and Duke University.