Karen Ho

Karen Ho is an associate professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research centers on the problematic of understanding and representing financial markets, sites that are resistant to cultural analysis and often disavow various attempts to locate or particularize them. Her domain of interest is the anthropology of economy, broadly conceived, with specific foci on finance capital, capitalism, globalization, corporations, socio-economic inequalities, and comparative ethnic and feminist studies. Her ethnography, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Duke University Press, 2009) was based on three years of fieldwork among investment bankers and major financial institutions. Recent publications include ‘Finance and Morality’ (A Companion to Moral Anthropology. Fassin, Didier, ed., 2012) and ‘Corporate Nostalgia: Managerial Capitalism from a Contemporary Perspective’ (Corporations and Citizenship. Urban, Greg, ed., 2014). Her latest book project attempts to excavate an alternative cultural history of financial risk through the ethno-historic investigation of three central sites – corporations, investment practices, and investment funds – from the mid-twentieth century until the present moment.