Benjamin Junge
Professor of Anthropology, State University of New York at New Paltz
Education
- Ph.D, Anthropology – Emory University, 2007
- MA, Anthropology – Emory University, 2002
- MHS, Public Health – Johns Hopkins, 1994
- BA, East Asian Studies – Wesleyan University 1988
Books
Biography
Dr. Benjamin Junge is a cultural anthropologist with specialization in Latin American studies, political anthropology, gender/sexuality studies, and medical anthropology. His primary training, from Emory University, is in socio-cultural anthropology and Brazilian history, culture and politics. He also has a Masters degree in health science from Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he worked for several years as a researcher on HIV prevention among injection drug users. His primary research and writing projects are based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Porto Alegre, Brazil and examines the formation of citizen identity in a city internationally known for its vibrant leftist political landscape and experiments in participatory democracy.
He is a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is the author of Cynical Citizenship: Gender, Regionalism and Political Subjectivity in Porto Alegre, Brazil (2018) and co-editor of Lived Religion and Lived Citizenship and the in-press Precarious Democracy: Ethnographies of Hope, Despair and Resistance in Brazil. His research focuses on class mobility, political attitudes, gender, sexuality, health, and religion. He recently co-directed a three-year investigation of political subjectivities among the demographic sector once known as Brazil’s “new middle class,” focusing on perceptions of the 2013-18 crisis, cultural memory of authoritarian pasts, and the rise of popular conservativism.