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Catherine Bolten

Professor of Anthropology and Peace Studies

Catherine Bolten headshot
Office
317 Hesburgh Center for International Studies
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Phone
(574) 631-5099
Email
cbolten@nd.edu

Expertise

African civil wars; post-war development; youth; education; agriculture and food security; human-environment entanglements; plantations; climate change

Biography & Research 

Catherine Bolten is professor of anthropology and peace studies in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a core-affiliated faculty member of the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. 

Bolten has been working in Sierra Leone since 2003, focusing first on issues of memory, poverty, morality, and post-war development. Her first book "I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone" (2012) is part of the University of California Press Series in Public Anthropology. Her second book, "Serious Youth in Sierra Leone: An Ethnography of Performance and Global Connection," was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. The book focuses on the material practices of youth who, instead of wanting to overthrow or change a patronage system widely credited with causing the war, instead yearn to belong to it. This bid to be taken “seriously” is misinterpreted by adults who feel threatened by young people’s facility with technology and the trappings of globalization, causing intergenerational friction.

Bolten's current book project is entitled "Unknowing the World: Humans, Chimpanzees, and Climate [Change] in Sierra Leone," and will be published by the University of Toronto Press in 2027. The book is based on a decade of research in central Sierra Leone on the nexus between food insecurity, population growth and family dynamics, land degradation, and wildlife competition - specifically with chimpanzees - in light of the threat of climate change. Articles and book chapters from that project have been published in the edited volume "Living With Animals," The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, African Studies Review and Economic Anthropology. She is also completing a graphic novella inspired by the project in partnership with Petroglyph Studios, titled "Zainab Must Choose: Histories and Futures in Rural West Africa."

Bolten's current project investigates the harms produced by eucalyptus plantations in the Global South, which have become ubiquitous in the green transition as a viable carbon sink and source of “environmentally friendly” wood, pulp and oil products. Widely pushed as a reforestation solution, in fact they threaten biodiversity and human rights in some of the most marginal, vulnerable communities on earth. She is currently focused on fieldwork in Sierra Leone on the operations and ramifications for human rights and the environment of a Forest Stewardship Council-certified plantation.

Bolten was a member of the international Ebola Anthropology Emergency Task Force, and co-edited a special issue on Ebola for Anthropological Quarterly in 2017. She also completed an ethnographic evaluation of emergency crop interventions in South Sudan for USAID. She has consulted for the United Nations World Food Programme and Physicians for Social Responsibility, and has conducted extensive fieldwork on ethnobotany, ecotourism and development in Botswana. Her articles appear in American Anthropologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropological Quarterly, and The Journal of Human Rights, among many others. She is an associate editor for the African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review, an interdisciplinary forum for studies of conflict and peace in Africa.

Recent Work

Recognition and Awards

Courses

In the Media