Positions

Research Areas research areas

Overview

  • 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.
  • Selected Publications

    Academic Article

    Year Title
    2022 Visiting Hours: Spacetimes of Human-Animal Interaction in South African Elder Care.Medical Anthropology Quarterly Medical anthropology newsletter.  36:217-236. 2022
    2022 Aspects of ICT connectivity among older adults living in rural subsidized housing: reassessing the digital divideJournal of Enabling Technologies.  16:17-27. 2022
    2020 Countermythologies: Queering Lives in a Southern African Gay and Lesbian Pentecostal ChurchTransforming Anthropology.  28:155-168. 2020
    2020 Society for Humanistic Anthropology 2019 Writing AwardsAnthropology and Humanism Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly.  45:139-141. 2020
    2020 Greying mutuality: race and joking relations in a South African nursing homeAfrica.  90:273-292. 2020
    2020 "Yesterday is History, Tomorrow is a Mystery": Dying in South African Frail CareAnthropology & Aging.  41:9-23. 2020
    2019 Interrogating traditionalism: gender and Swazi Culture in HIV/AIDS policy. “50 Years of Swazi Independence” issue, V. Laterza, N.C. Dlamini, and N. Mkhwanazi, edsJournal of Contemporary African Studies.  1-16. 2019
    2019 Thumb WarAnthropology and Humanism Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly.  44:194-197. 2019
    2019 Thumb War. Anthropology and Humanism 44(2): 194-197 2019
    2018 Funeral Culture 2018
    2018 Elder Care and Private Health Insurance in South Africa: The Pathos of Race-Class.Medical Anthropology: Cross Cultural Studies in Health and Illness.  37:311-326. 2018
    2018 Work of a Nation: Christian Funerary Ecumenism and Institutional Disruption in SwazilandJournal of Southern African Studies.  44:299-314. 2018
    2017 Authority.Medical Humanities.  43:206. 2017
    2017 Christians' cut: popular religion and the global health campaign for medical male circumcision in Swaziland.Culture, Health and Sexuality.  19:844-858. 2017
    2017 “My Mother Got Annoyed”Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine.  83:405-405. 2017
    2016 Blind spotMedicine Anthropology Theory.  3:158. 2016
    2016 Game Walk at PilanesbergAnthropology and Humanism Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly.  41:216-217. 2016
    2016 Religion and Migration: Cases for a Global Material EthicsAfrican Studies.  75:449-462. 2016
    2016 Outliving love: marital estrangement in an African insurance marketSocial Dynamics.  42:304-320. 2016
    2016 Risk, Mistake, and Generational Contest in Bodily Rituals of Swazi Jerikho ZionismJournal of Contemporary Religion Religion Today.  31:351-364. 2016
    2015 Urban cemeteries in Swaziland: materialising dignityAnthropology Southern Africa.  38:360-371. 2015
    2015 wearing memories: clothing and the global lives of mourning in swazilandMaterial Religion.  11:303-327. 2015
    2015 Compassion technology: Life insurance and the remaking of kinship in Swaziland's age of HIVAmerican Ethnologist.  42:81-96. 2015
    2014 Generational inversions: 'working' for social reproduction amid HIV in Swaziland.African Journal of AIDS Research.  13:351-359. 2014

    Book

    Year Title
    2018 Funeral Culture: AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom 2018

    Chapter

    Year Title
    2022 Deathnography: Writing, Reading, and Radical Mourning.  105-124. 2022
    2021 Dark Matter: Formations of Death Pollution in Southern African Funerals.  297-316. 2021
    2021 12. Dark Matter: Formations of Death Pollution in Southeastern African Funerals.  297-316. 2021
    2021 Dark Matter.  297-316. 2021
    2020 Beautiful Blessings: LGBTIQA Christians’ Reproductive and Parenting Aspirations..  38-44. 2020
    2018 Uhlanga. In African Religions: Beliefs and Practices Through History. Editors: Thomas, Douglas, Alanamu, Temilola, p. 241. ABC-CLIO Greenwood, Santa Barbara..  241-241. 2018
    2016 Polygamy, Polygyny, and Polyandry.  1-3. 2016
    2016 Purity versus Pollution.  1-2. 2016

    Conference Paper

    Year Title
    "Securing Frailty: Black Aspirations for Senior Housing in South Africa"

    Teaching Activities

  • Africana Religions Taught course 2022
  • The Body: Fat, Fitness & Form Taught course 2022
  • Gendr, Sex, HIV Sub-Sahara Afr Taught course 2021
  • Peoples&Cultures/Sub-Sahar Afr Taught course 2021
  • Global Population & Health Taught course 2021
  • Global Population & Health Taught course 2021
  • Honors Senior Thesis Taught course 2021
  • Peoples&Cultures/Sub-Saharan Taught course 2021
  • Peoples&Cultures/Sub-Saharan Taught course 2021
  • Gendr, Sex, HIV Sub-Sahara Afr Taught course 2020
  • Honors Senior Thesis Taught course 2020
  • The Body: Fat, Fitness & Form Taught course 2020
  • Global Perspectives:Intro Anth Taught course 2020
  • Africana Religions Taught course 2020
  • Medical Anth:Illness & Healing Taught course 2020
  • Global Perspectives:Intro Anth Taught course 2019
  • Gendr, Sex, HIV Sub-Sahara Afr Taught course 2019
  • Internship Taught course 2019
  • Medical Anth:Illness & Healing Taught course 2019
  • Peoples & Cultures/Sub Saharan Taught course 2018
  • Reading and Research Taught course 2018
  • Global Perspectives:Intro Anth Taught course 2018
  • Global Population & Health Taught course 2018
  • Peoples&Cultures of World\Hon Taught course 2018
  • PeoplesCultures:Sub-Sah Africa Taught course 2018
  • Reading and Research Taught course 2018
  • Gendr, Sex, HIV Sub-Sahara Afr Taught course 2017
  • The Body: Fat, Fitness & Form Taught course 2017
  • Medical Anthropology Taught course 2017
  • PeoplesCultures:Sub-Sah Africa Taught course 2017
  • Peoples&Cultures/SubSaharan Af Taught course 2016
  • Education And Training

  • B.A. Sociology, Saint Norbert College
  • Ph.D. Anthropology, Brandeis University
  • Full Name

  • Casey Golomski