Kathryn Takabvirwa

Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology and the College

Kathryn Takabvirwa is a social and cultural anthropologist. Her research centers on policing and citizenship in Zimbabwe, as well as on migration, governance, and the state in Southern Africa. She is interested in the ways people reconcile themselves to the idea of the state and of citizenship, in light of histories of state violence. She is working on a book manuscript on contemporary experiences of policing in Zimbabwe, which focuses on encounters between police officers and those they stop on Zimbabwe’s roads. She has received numerous fellowships and grants, from sponsors including the National Science Foundation, Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, and Wenner-Gren Foundation. Prior to her work on policing, she conducted research on xenophobia and local governance in South Africa with scholars at the African Centre for Migration and Society in Johannesburg.

Takabvirwa received an MA and PhD in anthropology from Stanford University, an MA in forced migration studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, and a BA in anthropology and African studies from Yale University. Most recently, she was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago.

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