Michelle C. Johnson

Email: mjohnson@bucknell.edu
Telephone: 570.577.1354
Fax: 570.577.3543

Teaching/research specialties: West Africa; Africans in Europe; symbolic and interpretive anthropology; ethnicity; religion and ritual; Islam; the life course; ethnographic field methods; anthropological theory; transnational communities.

Michelle C. Johnson is a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in religion and ritual in West Africa and in the contemporary African diaspora. She received her B.A. from the University of Washington and her Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently an associate professor. Her research explores how competing notions of ethnicity and Islam are currently engaging transnational debates among Mandinga in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal, and how these debates are being played out through life course rituals. She has held a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education and two fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, and has authored several articles on religion in Guinea-Bissau and Portugal.

Courses Taught

ANTH 109 - Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

ANTH/SOCI - Field Reseqrch in Local Communities

ANTH 228 - Ritual, Myth, and Meaning: The Anthropology of Religion

ANTH 235 - Modern Africa

ANTH 283 - Interpreting Culture: Theory in Anthropology

ANTH 329 - Spirits, Saints, and Sufis: Relgions in Africa