Jane K. Cowan
Jane K. Cowan is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Sussex, where she taught from 1991-2020. With regional expertise in Greece and the Balkans, her research interests include gender, power, the body, dance, performance, culture and rights, and petitioning, supervision and audit practices in international institutions. The author and editor of numerous publications, including Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece (Princeton 1990) and Culture and Rights: Anthropological Perspectives (co-edited with M. Dembour and R. Wilson, Cambridge 2001), her current writing concerns two projects: first, the intersection of rights talk, ritual performance and audit practices at the United Nations Universal Periodic Review (with Julie Billaud) and second, political interactions around petitioning at the interwar League of Nations minorities supervision in relation to Macedonia. She was President of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe from 2022-2024 and currently serves on the American Anthropological Association Executive Board.
