Julie Kleinman

Ph.D. Harvard University, 2013
M.A. Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2007
B.A. Haverford College, 2004

Migration, borders, urban studies, labor, race, infrastructure, social movements

Julie Kleinman is an urban anthropologist working in France and francophone West Africa. Her research examines how migration changes urban spaces and social relations. Her book, Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris (forthcoming in 2019 with University of California Press) examines how West African migrants retool French urban infrastructures to create alternative pathways toward social and economic integration where state institutions have failed. Since 2013, she has been conducting fieldwork in Mali (Bamako and Kayes) for a second book project on everyday pan-Africanism as seen through African migrants’ experience in Mali, deportee rights activism, and return migrants’ novel approaches to political participation and development projects. Dr. Kleinman has also done research on the construction of cultural difference in French schools, French urban planning and “African” markets in Paris, social activism and humanitarian aid in Mali, and the transnational kinship practices of Malian migrants.

Dr. Kleinman’s work has been funded by the SSRC and the Mellon Foundation and has received prizes from the Society for the Anthropology of Europe and the Society for Urban, National, and Transnational/Global Anthropology. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Oberlin College, and Assistant Professor at Penn State University before coming to Fordham. In the Spring of 2018, she held the McMillan-Stewart Fellowship at the Hutchins Center’s W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute of Harvard University.

Forthcoming, 2019. Adventure Capital: Migration and the Making of an African Hub in Paris. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.

“Infrastructure Across Borders: Translating Adventures in Bamako and Paris.” In Forum: Adventures in Infrastructure. City & Society 33(2), 2021.

 “From Little Brother to Big Somebody: Coming of Age at the Gare du Nord.” In Affective Circuits: African Journeys and the Pursuit of Social Regeneration edited by Jennifer Cole and Christian Groes-Green. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 245-268, 2016. 

 "‘All Sons and Daughters of the Republic’? Producing Difference in French Education.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI). 22(2):261-278, 2016.

"Adventures in Infrastructure: Making an African Hub in Paris."  City and Society 26(3), 2014.

"The Path between Two Points:  Malian Adventures in France."  Transition 113: 25-43, 2014.

“The Gare du Nord: Parisian Topographies of Exchange.” Ethnologie française 42(3): 567-576, 2012.
 

Infrastructure Across Borders: Translating Adventures in Bamako and Paris. In Forum: Adventures in Infrastructure. City & Society 33(2), 2021.

Translation of The Politics of Survival by Marc Abélès, from the French. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.