Karen Ho

Karen Ho is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities in the College of Liberal Arts. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Princeton University and an M.A. in Education from Stanford University. Ho's research centers on cultural studies of finance capital, finance, globalization, and capitalism, as well as ethnography, feminist studies, political economy, the United States, and comparative race and ethnicity. She serves as Director of the College of Liberal Arts' Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Studies Initiative and maintains affiliate faculty appointments in American Studies and Sociology. Located in the Anthropology department at 395 Hubert H. Humphrey Center, Ho teaches and conducts research in sociocultural anthropology.

Ho is the author of Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009), which examines investment banking culture on Wall Street and its contributions to corporate downsizing. Her key publications include 'Situating Global Capitalisms: A View from Wall Street Investment Banks' (Cultural Anthropology, 2005), 'Disciplining Investment Bankers, Disciplining the Economy: Wall Street's Institutional Culture of Crisis and the Downsizing of "Corporate America"' (American Anthropologist, 2009), 'Neoliberal Agency' (Current Anthropology, 2011), and 'Gens: A Feminist Manifesto for the Study of Capitalism' (Cultural Anthropology, 2015). Ho's work has been cited more than 5,000 times according to Google Scholar, impacting economic anthropology, critical studies of finance, and interdisciplinary analyses of capitalism and inequality. She received the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship from the University of Minnesota in 2007 and the Graduate-Professional Teaching Award from the same institution. Ho has delivered keynote addresses, including at EPIC2016 on cultures of finance and risk, and contributed to discussions on financialization and Wall Street rationalities.

Professional Email: karenho@umn.edu