Rate My Professor Michael Cepek

Michael Cepek is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He received his B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1996, M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1999, and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2006. After completing his doctorate, he served as Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Macalester College from 2006 to 2007. Cepek joined UTSA over 13 years ago and teaches courses on Indigenous peoples and politics, environment and culture, the oil industry, shamanism and cosmology, anthropological theory, and introductory anthropology. He coordinates the core curriculum for Introduction to Anthropology, chairs the department’s Merit Revision Committee and Core Curriculum Assessments, serves as faculty co-coordinator of the Workshop on Culture, Environment, and Society, manages the department’s lecture series, doctoral program recruitment, and website, and participates in various university committees including the Graduate Council. Cepek’s research examines cultural difference, political power, and environmental change in Ecuador’s Indigenous Cofán Nation across Andean foothills and Amazonian forests. He has maintained a 30-year collaborative partnership with the Cofán people, integrating ethnography, theory, public scholarship, and advocacy to advance their territorial, medical, and educational initiatives. As President of the Cofán Survival Fund, a U.S.-based nonprofit, he supports these efforts through its Ecuadorian counterpart. His interests encompass environmental, economic, and political anthropology, religious studies, conservation policy, extractive industries, Indigenous politics, shamanism, and community-engaged research.

Cepek authored A Future for Amazonia: Randy Borman and Cofán Environmental Politics (University of Texas Press, 2012) and Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia (University of Texas Press, 2018), alongside an upcoming co-authored book, Violent Healing: Shamanism, Dispossession, and Death in Amazonia, with Cesario Lucitante. Selected publications include “Foucault in the Forest: Questioning Environmentality in Amazonia” (American Ethnologist, 2011), “There Might Be Blood: Oil, Humility, and the Cosmopolitics of a Cofán Petro-Being” (American Ethnologist, 2016), “Governance and Conservation Effectiveness in Protected Areas and Indigenous and Locally Managed Areas” (Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 2023), and “The Loss of Oil: Constituting Disaster in Amazonian Ecuador” (Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2012). He has earned the Guggenheim Fellowship (2023–2024), President’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Advancing Globalization (2023), President’s Distinguished Achievement Awards for Core Curriculum Teaching and Community Engagement (2021), President’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching Excellence (2016), Fulbright Core U.S. Scholars Program Grant (2019–2022), American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2015–2016), multiple Wenner-Gren Foundation grants, and the Sol Tax Dissertation Prize (2007). Cepek chairs dissertation and master’s committees and contributes to the fields of environmental anthropology, Indigenous studies, and conservation through his scholarship and activism.