Erin L. Durban

Erin L. Durban is an associate professor of anthropology and critical disability studies at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities.

Durban is finishing their second book manuscript, "Enabling Ethnography: Anti-Ableist Fieldwork Methods in and Beyond Anthropology" (under contract with University of Minnesota Press). The traditional model of ethnographic fieldwork relies on hyperproductive researchers with adaptive capital negotiating their informants’ immobilities, a residue of the interrelated white, colonial, masculinist, and ableist design of anthropology (for more, read Durban's "Anthropology and Ableism" article in American Anthropologist). Enabling Ethnography argues that a greater diversity of researcher bodyminds enhances ethnographic inquiry and analysis for interdisciplinary scholarship. Developed from two collaborative research projects—one an experiment in anti-ableist research design about universities and racial inequality (more information below), the other a collaborative oral history project with Professor Sumi Colligan and O. Sailer interviewing disabled, chronically ill, Deaf, and mad anthropologists—this project additionally makes a significant methodological contribution in terms of thinking through the details of disability accessibility and collective access in ethnographic fieldwork.

Durban’s first book, The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti (2022), was awarded the National Women’s Studies Association–UIP First Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT+ Studies. It focuses on the gender and sexual politics of French colonialism and American imperialism in Haiti. The Sexual Politics of Empire chronicles contests between two transnational social movements in Haiti—evangelical Christianity and LGBTQI human rights—and Haitian mobilizations of antihomophobic politics to theorize postcolonial homophobia. The book is available open access through the University of Illinois Press.

Durban also edited the "Trans* Ecologies" double issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly with Megan Moore and a special issue of Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory titled “Nou Mach Ansanm (We Walk Together): Queer Haitian Performance and Affiliation” with Dasha A. Chapman and Mario LaMothe.

Durban is the former managing editor of Feminist Formations (the National Women’s Studies Association Journal) and has published articles and chapters in American Anthropologist, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Feminist Formations, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Transgender Studies Quarterly, The Journal of Haitian Studies, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, Unsettling Queer Anthropology (2024), Inaccessible Access (2025), and The Disabled Anthropologist (2025). Their chapter “The Present-Future is Disabled” is included in a textbook entirely written by Feminist Studies PhDs, Feminist Studies: An Introductory Reader (2025).

Durban has been working on an experimental ethnographic and archival research project since 2020 focused on collective access for researchers. "Professorville: The Racial History and Legacy of a University of Minnesota Neighborhood" is a collaborative project with Professor Miranda Joseph and more than two dozen undergraduate and graduate students at UMN. The project is an interdisciplinary study of the university that considers the legacy of building an all-white faculty neighborhood on the UMN St. Paul campus in the 1930s.

Durban currently serves on the Disability Research Interest Group Steering Committee and is the former Chair of the AAA Association for Queer Anthropology. They founded the Sociocultural Anthropology Network for Disabled Scholars (SANDS) to connect crip ethnographers.

Current Advisees:

• PanChen Lo (Anthropology)
• Selena Moon (American Studies)
• Jaewon Byun (Anthropology)