Shannon Lee Dawdy

Shannon Lee Dawdy is an American anthropologist, historian, and archaeologist. She is a professor at the University of Chicago and a MacArthur Fellow.

Education
Dawdy holds a PhD in anthropology and history and an MA in history from the University of Michigan, an MA in anthropology from the College of William and Mary and a BA in anthropology from Reed College.

Research
Dawdy is 'Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College' at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the Americas, with a special focus on New Orleans, from the colonial period to the post-Katrina present. Her research has focused on the history of capitalism and informal economies (including piracy) urban landscapes, human-object relations, and temporality (how people shape and experience the past, present, and future). Her newest work examines rapidly changing death practices in the U.S., resulting in both a film (I Like Dirt. with co-director Daniel Zox) and a book, American Afterlives: Reinventing Death in the Twenty-first Century (October 2021, Princeton). She writes for both academic and general audiences.

In 2010, Dawdy was named a MacArthur Fellow. She has also received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation.