Casey Golomski is an award-winning writer and cultural and medical anthropologist of Southern Africa who works with communities in eSwatini (Swaziland) and South Africa. His writing and research centers perennial questions about life, death, and their thresholds. Aside from authoring over thirty academic and literary publications, Golomski's been interviewed for and cited by media outlets such as the New York Times, New Hampshire Public Radio, New Hampshire Magazine, AlexNews, and Business Times.
His current research explores aging and racism, in the effects of racist policies and practices on elder care in South Africa. He is writing two books. One on the history of senior housing in South Africa from 1870-2020, and the other a work of creative non-fiction about white dying. Featuring the memoirs of individuals in one small-town old age home--black and white elders of the apartheid generation and black nurses of the born-free generation, widows young and old, nurses and traditional healers, former colonists and anti-colonial freedom fighters, and Nelson Mandela's Robben Island prison nurse--this story answers the question of 'who cares' (and for whom) in the aftermath of racial violence.
Based on years of field research, his first book, 'Funeral Culture - AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom' (Indiana University Press), is the first and still only comprehensive account of the AIDS epidemic in eSwatini, Africa's last absolute monarchy and the country with the world's highest HIV prevalence for more than 15 years. Through the voices of people in rural and urban communities, churches, businesses, and NGOs, Funeral Culture documents how grassroots responses to the epidemic drove innovations in everyday care practices that counteract the state's conservative cultural projects. The book shows how disease epidemics, whether AIDS or COVID-19, become grounds for citizens to engage in political reforms around aspirations for work. This quest for dignity through work--to make livelihoods--also galvanizes ongoing pro-democracy movements in the Kingdom.
Funded by three Fulbright Fellowships, the Wenner Gren, Reed, Mellon, and Teagle Foundations, and institutional grants, his research and creative writing has been published in a range of anthropology, African studies, and literary journals as well as several edited volumes. He was also awarded the Society for Humanistic Anthropology First Prize in Poetry. As an invited speaker on his research and approaches to writing, he has given talks at Emory, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, and Michigan State, Oslo, and the Universities of Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal, Pretoria, and the Witwatersrand in South Africa where he is an ongoing Visiting Researcher.
A former UNICEF consultant, he is currently a board member for the journal Anthropology and Humanism, the Northeastern Workshops on Southern Africa (NEWSA) and Seacoast African American Cultural Center (SAACC) in Portsmouth, NH where he supervises internships and public cultural education through curation of their collections. For SAACC, he also received a state-wide Spirit of NH Volunteer Service Award. He is also a classical musician as a long-term member of the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra in Cambridge, MA.
He is always happy to meet with and advise interested students and consult for community, public, and private organizations.
