Julia Kowalski

Julia Kowalski is an assistant professor of global affairs at the Keough School of Global Affairs and a concurrent faculty member in Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program. She has been a Kellogg Institute faculty fellow since 2020.

A cultural anthropologist by training, she conducts fieldwork in North India, focusing on issues of gender, kinship, women’s rights, personhood, gendered violence, and everyday institutional practices.

Kowalski’s research draws upon methods and theories from cultural, medical, and linguistic anthropology to understand how people work for social change. Her current book project, “Counseling Kinship: Women’s Rights and the Politics of Interdependence in Jaipur,” is an ethnographic study of family counselors employed at women’s rights nongovernmental organizations.

Kowalski’s research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Institute for Indian Studies. Her work has been published in American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Social Politics. She also writes and edits features online for Somatosphere and Anthropology News. Her future work will consider how counseling and other pedagogical practices address sexuality and intimacy among youth in contemporary India, as well as further exploring the history of practices like counseling and mediation in South Asia.

Kowalski completed her PhD in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago.