About

Danilyn Rutherford is an anthropologist and author. She began her career as a visiting tutor at Goldsmiths College, before joining the faculty at the University of Chicago, then the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she was professor and chair.

Her early work focused on the Indonesian-occupied West Papua, a troubled territory on the eastern half of New Guinea. More recently, she’s been exploring the social worlds of young people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities in the United States. Her interests are broad and eclectic. She has written on kinship, Christian conversion, disability, nationalism, sovereignty, missionary language ideology, Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” affect, money, technology, climate change, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

She has a passion for supporting other scholars, which she satisfies through her day job as President of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. She lives a half a mile from the ocean with her husband, daughter, and dog.