Stephanie Kane, an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, received her Ph.D. in social and cultural anthropology and her Masters in zoology from the University of Texas at Austin. She’s a trained ethnographer and ecologist with a broad interdisciplinary interest in cultural  studies.

Her first book, The Phantom Gringo Boat: Shamanic Discourse and Development in Panama (1994 Smithsonian), is based on her mid-1980s fieldwork among the Emberá and Waunan peoples of the Darién Gap. It focuses on cultural processes accompanying the shift from dispersed to concentrated settlement and their political incorporation into the nation-state. See also “General Noriega’s toads: An ethnographic theater of the absurd” in Social Text  (1996); “Omission in Emberá (Chocó) mythography” and “Experience and myth in a Colombian Chocó case of attempted murder” in Journal of Folklore Research  (1988 & 1993).

Her second book, AIDS Alibis: Sex, Drugs, and Crime in the Americas  (1998 Temple), discusses the possibilities and subversions of AIDS intervention in Southside Chicago, Belize City and Punta Gorda, Belize, in the mass media and in legal documents.  Her AIDS ethnography has also been  published in the journals Annual Review of Anthropology (2001), Ethnologies (2001), Crime and Delinquency  (1997), Law and Policy (1994), Social Science and Medicine (1991 & 1992), Canadian Folklore canadien (1992), Human Organization (1992) and Journal of Sex Research (1990).

Her current research in cross-cultural criminal justice focuses on the relationship between local peoples and  places and the networks that link them to global images, events and histories. She is currently working on an ex-con’s biography, provisionally entitled “The Warden's Ear” and editing a collection of essays with Phil Parnell entitled “Crime’s Power: Anthropologists and the Ethnography of Crime" which will be published by Palgrave/St.Martin Press.

Dr. Kane teaches: Cross-Cultural Studies; Sexuality and the Law; Sex, Drugs and AIDS; Feminist Studies and Ethnographic Practice; Deviant Images/Deviant Acts; and Qualitative Methods.