Laurie Kain Hart, Ph.D.

Laurie Kain Hart is Professor of Anthropology at the UCLA College of Letters and Science (Department of Anthropology, Division of Social Science). She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University and was formerly Edmund and Margiana Stinnes Professor of Global Studies and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Haverford College. Her research interests include: violence, civil war, ethnicity and borders; space, architecture, art, material and visual culture; medical and psychoanalytic anthropology and the health risk environment; kinship, gender and social theory. Her research sites include Greece, the circum-Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the US inner-city (Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York).

  • UCLA Anthropology BOX 953108, 307 Haines. lkainhart@ucla.edu
Selected Publications

2017 (In Press) “The Material Life of War at the Greek Border.” Social Anthropology, Special Issue, “Post-Ottoman Topologies.” Ed. Nicolas Argenti. Winter 2017.

2014 “The Moral Economy of Violence in the US Inner City.” Current Anthropology. 55(1): 1–22. (with George Karandinos, Fernando Montero Castrillo and Philippe Bourgois)

2012 “Expectations of the State: An Exile Returns to his Country.” In: Contesting the State: Dynamics of Resistance and Control. Eds. Bruce Kapferer and Angela Hobart. London: Sean Kingston Publications. Pp. 225-259.

2011 “Structural Vulnerability and Health: Latino Migrant Laborers in the United States.” With James Quesada and Philippe Bourgois. Medical Anthropology, 30:4:339-362.

Research Interests

Violence, civil war, ethnicity and borders; space, architecture, art, material and visual culture; medical and psychoanalytic anthropology and the health risk environment; kinship, gender and social theory. 

Her ongoing work in Greece focuses on the sequelae of violence in Northern Greece on border communities and among former child political refugees of the Greek Civil War.  She is collaborating on an ethnographic analysis of urban segregation, violence, incarceration, and the medicalization of poverty in the open air narcotics markets of Philadelphia’s Puerto Rican inner city.  She participates in the Center for Social Medicine’s multi-methods, interdisciplinary study of the intersections of mental illness, indigent poverty and incarceration in Los Angeles including the dialogue between psychoanalysis and social science.