Erica Lorraine Williams, Ph.D.

Erica Lorraine Williams joined the department of sociology and anthropology as an assistant professor in 2009. She completed her doctorate in cultural and social anthropology from Stanford University in January 2010.

She earned her master's in cultural anthropology from Stanford in 2005, and her bachelor's in anthropology and Africana studies from New York University in 2002.

Her dissertation, "Anxious Pleasures: Race and the Sexual Economies of Transnational Tourism in Salvador, Brazil," is an ethnography of the sexual and cultural politics of the tourism industry in Salvador, Bahia.

Her research focuses on the relationships between "sex tourism" and the marketing of an eroticized Afro-Brazilian culture as a tourist commodity in Salvador.

Her teaching interests include: Introduction to Anthropology, Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Gender, Anthropology of Globalization; Anthropology of Latin America; and Race, Erotics and Globalization She also teaches African Diaspora and the World.