Catherine Lutz is professor of anthropology at Brown University and professor (research) at the Watson Institute. Her areas of interest include military, war, and society; race and gender; democracy; subjectivity and power; photography and cultural history; critical theory; anthropological methods; sociocultural contexts of science; U.S. twentieth century history and ethnography; and the Pacific Rim. She received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Swarthmore College and her PhD in social anthropology from Harvard University. Her most recent books include Local Democracy under Siege: Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics (New York University Press, 2007) and Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Beacon Press, 2001), winner of the Leeds Prize and the Victor Turner Prize. Others include Reading National Geographic (Chicago, 1993) with Jane Collins, and Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory (Chicago, 1988). She is the immediate past president of the American Ethnological Society, the largest organization of cultural anthropologists in the U.S.