Julia Kowalski is an assistant professor of global affairs and a concurrent faculty member in Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program. A cultural anthropologist by training, she completed her PhD in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has been conducting fieldwork in north India since 2007, focusing on issues of gender, kinship, women’s rights, personhood, gendered violence, and everyday institutional practices.
Kowalski’s research draws upon methods and theories from cultural, medical, and linguistic anthropology to understand how people work for social change. Her current book project, “Counseling Kinship: Women’s Rights and the Politics of Interdependence in Jaipur,” is an ethnographic study of family counselors employed at women’s rights nongovernmental organizations, based on fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2017.