Rhodes alumnus Dr. Ann Kingsolver ’82 will be the speaker at this year’s Phi Beta Kappa induction luncheon to be held on campus May 9.
Kingsolver was an honors graduate in anthropology/sociology, and completed a major research project on the fertility trends of Mexican-American women in Tucson, AZ.
While at Rhodes, Kingsolver also participated in the Kinney Program, the Renaissance Festival, and the Southwestern Players. She was the third recipient the college’s highest academic honor, the Peyton Nalle Rhodes Phi Beta Kappa Prize awarded each year at commencement.
After graduation, Kingsolver worked in jobs around the country, from a Spanish-speaking free clinic in Arizona to directing a bioregional project on Cape Cod. She enrolled in graduate school in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where she received her master′s degree in 1987 and doctorate in 1991.
Kingsolver focuses on political anthropology as a cultural anthropologist, and her ethnographic fieldwork has been in the U.S., Mexico, and Sri Lanka. In addition to receiving numerous academic awards and publishing dozens of scholarly articles, Kingsolver is the author of four books on topics ranging from class and power to NAFTA and globalization. Her most recent study is "Tobacco Town Futures: Global Encounters in Rural Kentucky." Kingsolver′s career came full circle when in 2011 she moved back to her native Kentucky to direct the Appalachian Center and Appalachian Studies Program at the University of Kentucky.