Profile
Rachel Heiman is Associate Professor of Anthropology at 麻豆传媒色情片. She received her B.A in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the generative relationship between habits, sentiments, and spaces of everyday life and emerging cultural, political, economic, and environmental conditions. She is the author of (University of California Press, 2015) and co-editor (with Carla Freeman & Mark Liechty) of (School for Advanced Research Press, 2012). Her current project, for which she received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Post-Ph.D. Research Grant from the , and an , brings together anthropology, urbanism, and architecture to explore emerging subjectivities, modes of citizenship, and regimes of governance amid efforts to redesign suburbia for a more sustainable future. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the , the in Santa Fe, NM, the in New York, and听the at the Graduate Center/CUNY,听and a faculty fellow at the 听For the 2026-2027 Academic Year, she will hold the听Visiting Research Fellowship at the at the University of Utah to complete her book manuscript, Retrofitting the American Dream: An Ethnography of Suburban Redesign.
Rachel Heiman is currently Co-Chair of the Liberal Arts Program, Interim Coodinator of the BPATS Credit for Prior Learning Program, and Core Faculty Advisor in the BPATS Program. She previously served as Chair of the Urban Studies Program and as Interim Coordinator of the BPATS Self-Directed Learning Projects Program.
Degrees Held
2004听听听 Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of Michigan
1996听听听 M.A. in Anthropology, University of Michigan
1992听听听 B.A. in Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
Recent Publications
BOOKS:
. California Series in Public Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015.
. Advanced Seminar Series. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2012. (Co-edited with Carla Freeman & Mark Liechty)
SELECT ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS:
鈥淚ntroduction鈥 in The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography, eds. Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, and Mark Liechty.听 Pp. 3-29. Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2012. (Co-authored with Mark Liechty & Carla Freeman)
鈥淕ate Expectations: Discursive Displacement of the 鈥極ld Middle Class鈥 in an American Suburb鈥 in The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography, eds. Rachel Heiman, Carla Freeman, and Mark Liechty.听 Pp. 237-69. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2012.
鈥溾楢t Risk鈥 for Becoming Neoliberal Subjects: Rethinking the 鈥楴ormal鈥 Middle-Class Family,鈥 in Childhood, Youth, and Social Work in Transformation, eds. Lynn Nybell, Jeffrey Shook and Janet L. Finn. Pp. 301-13. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.
鈥淭he Last Days of Low-Density Living: Suburbs and the End of Oil,鈥 Built Environment 32 (May 2007): 213-26.
鈥淭he Ironic Contradictions in the Discourse on Generation X, or How 鈥楽lackers鈥 are Saving Capitalism,鈥 Childhood 8 (May 2001): 275-93.
鈥淰ehicles for Rugged Entitlement: Teenagers, Sport-Utility Vehicles, and the Suburban Upper-Middle Class,鈥 New Jersey History 118 (Fall/Winter 2000): 22-33.
MEDIA QUOTES AND PUBLIC SCHOLARSHIP
Quoted in Beck, Julie. The Atlantic, April 2, 2024.
Quoted in Kelleher, Katy. 听 Curbed,听November 13, 2019.
鈥, 鈥 Vernacular Architecture Newsletter,听Winter 2018.
鈥淎nxious Times in an American Suburb," UC Press Blog: Where Bright Minds Share Bold Ideas, August 15, 2014.
BOOK REVIEWS:
"Book Review of Protecting Suburban America: Gentrification, Advocacy and the Historic Imaginary, by DeniseLawrence-Z煤帽iga," Journal of Anthropological Research 75 (Summer 2019): 301-302.
Anthropology Book Forum, July 3, 2017.
"Book Review of Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City, by Julian Brash," PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 38 (November 2015): 365-67.
鈥淏ook Review of Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars, by Amy Best,鈥 Journal of Consumer Culture 7 (November 2007): 413-15.
Research Interests
Suburban life, sustainable urban design, habits of affect, structures of sentiment,听class anxieties, subject formation,听the consumption of class security, racial & spatial politics of class, zoning & the built environment, ethnography & ethnographic writing, United States, global middle classes听
Awards And Honors
Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah,听Visiting Research Fellow, 2026-2027
Advanced Research Collaborative/CUNY, Distinguished Visting Fellow, 2021
Stanford Humanities Center, External Faculty Fellow, 2018-2019
American Council of Learned Societies, ACLS Fellowship, 2018-2019
Wenner-Gren Foundation, Post Ph.D. Research Grant, 2017-2018
Vernacular Architecture Forum, Access Award, 2017
Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, Internal 麻豆传媒色情片 Faculty Fellow, 2016-2017
National Endowment for the Humanities, NEH Summer Stipend, 2016
麻豆传媒色情片 Provost鈥檚 Office, Faculty Research Fund Grant, 2015
麻豆传媒色情片 Provost's Office, Distinguished University Teaching Award, 2010
Russell Sage Foundation, Visiting Scholar, 2006-2007
School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, Westfeldt Bunting Summer Fellow, 2006