Mike McGovern

CV | mike.mcgovern@yale.edu

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Mailing address:
Department of Anthropology
Yale University
P. O. Box 208277
New Haven, CT 06520-8277

Office address:
10 Sachem Street, Room 120
Tel: (203) 432-3686
Fax: (203) 432-3669

Ph.D., Emory University, 2004

McGovern is a political anthropologist who works in West Africa and uses a variety of sources from kinship idioms to the aesthetics of state-sponsored folklore to try to understand postcolonial states within the arc of longer historical trajectories. His first book focuses on the dramaturgy, sociology, and political economy of the Ivorian civil conflict, and is entitled Making War in Côte d'Ivoire (U Chicago Press, April 2010). He is now finishing the manuscript for a book on the Republic of Guinea, which traces the intertwined processes of state formation and ethnogenesis over the course of the 20th century. Recent book chapters and articles have focused on the afterlife of authoritarian regimes in Guinean political practices and imaginaries; the politics of popular music in Côte d'Ivoire; the use of threats of international prosecution as a means of creating political leverage in the Ivorian conflict; and the interplay of Islamist conversion, local politics, and US counterterrorism policy in West Africa.

After completing a B.A. at Columbia, M.St. at Oxford and Ph.D. at Emory, he worked from 2004-2006 as the West Africa Project Director of the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank that analyzes the causes of armed conflict. In that position he researched and wrote papers on post-conflict reconstruction in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the social reintegration of ex-combatant youths, Liberian security sector reform, and the links between political economy and political rhetoric in Guinea and Côte d'Ivoire.

McGovern is the Director of Graduate Studies of African Studies. His teaching focuses on politics, expressive culture, youth and rebellion. In addition to the courses listed below, in 2010 he will be teaching or co-teaching ANTH 500a "Seminar in Sociocultural Anthropology: Historicizing the Discipline, Theorizing its History" and ANTH 541a "Agrarian Societies: Culture, Power, History and Development." He currently supervises PhD students working on a variety of topics in West and East Africa.

Courses:
Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Politics/Aesthetics
The State in Africa
Bandits, Rebels and Freedom Fighters: Anthropologies of Insurgency
Power, Violence, Cosmology