Associate Professor
Anthropology Undergraduate Program Director
Anthropology
Ph.D., Emory University

Email: drhannaf@central.uh.edu
Office: Old Science Building, Suite 230

Biographical Summary

Dinah Hannaford is a cultural anthropologist whose work centers around the political economy of intimate life. As an experienced ethnographic field researcher with a strong linguistic foundation in French, Italian, and Wolof, Hannaford uses fine-grained ethnography to offer fresh insights into the conditions, challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. Her work provides a substantive contribution to crucial questions about mobility, technology, intimacy and power.

Dr. Hannaford is the author of Aid and the Help: International Development and the Transnational Extraction of Care (Stanford University Press 2023), an ethnographic study of the intersection of aid work and domestic labor, and Marriage Without Borders: Transnational Spouses in Neoliberal Senegal (University of Pennsylvania Press 2017), on the phenomenon of long-distance marriages between Senegalese migrant husbands and non-migrant wives.

Dinah Hannaford is co-editor, with Joanna Davidson, of Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage Around the World (Rutgers University Press, 2022).