Samuel Mark Anderson conducts multidisciplinary research on expressive culture and its encounters with politics, religion, and public health in West Africa and beyond. His work engages with local experiences and conceptions of rights, justice, democracy, violence, privacy, and publicity that call into question globalized models. His ethnographic research in Sierra Leone focuses on how residents use diverse arts to pursue reconciliation, cultural reconstruction, and development projects in the wake of the country’s 1991–2002 civil war and 2014–2016 Ebola epidemic.
Anderson has written articles for Africa, Cultural Anthropology, and Antipode, contributions to American Ethnologist and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and co-edited the volume The Art of Emergency: Aesthetics and Aid in African Crises (Oxford University Press 2020). He has also collaborated on ethnographic films and exhibitions, including a video installation at the Art Institute of Chicago, a series of projects on ritual in South India, and another on South Asian immigrant communities in central California, as well as a variety of multimedia collaborations with artists from France and Burkina Faso. He holds a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and his work has been funded by grants and fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the U.S. Fulbright Program, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard.