Professor Anne Allison

Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University

Anne Allison is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Her research focuses on the intersection between political economy, everyday life, and the imagination in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her books include Nightwork: Sexuality, Pleasure, and Corporate Masculinity in a Tokyo Hostess Club (University of Chicago Press, 1994), Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination (University of California Press, 2006), and Precarious Japan (Duke University Press, 2013). She is currently finishing a book on new death practices in Japan where, in the wake of downsizing sociality and a trend towards living and dying alone, redesigning endingness and disposition techniques includes robot-priests, automated columbaria, and “grave-friends.”