Brackette F. Williams is an American anthropologist, and Senior Justice Advocate, Open Society Institute

Open Society Institute

The Open Society Institute , renamed in 2011 to Open Society Foundations, is a private operating and grantmaking foundation started by George Soros, aimed to shape public policy to promote democratic governance, human rights, and economic, legal, and social reform...

. She is currently an associate professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona.

Williams graduated from Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 with a BS, from the University of Arizona

University of Arizona

The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...

 with a master's in Education, and from the Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 with a PhD in Cultural Anthropology.
She has taught at Duke University

Duke University

Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...

, Queens College, the New School for Social Research, the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, the Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins University

The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

, the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

, and the University of Arizona

University of Arizona

The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...

.
Her work has centered on the Caribbean

Caribbean

The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...

 region, and in particular, examined how racial and ethnic categories are reproduced in Guyana

Guyanese

Guyanese may refer to:* Something of, from, or related to the country of Guyana* A person from Guyana, or of Guyanese descent. For information about the Guyanese people, see:** Demographics of Guyana** Culture of Guyana* Guyanese cuisine* Guyanese Creole...

 nationalism. Categories and classification systems - how they are developed, what basis they have in cultural contexts, and how they are put to use, by whom and for whom - have been a general theme in her work as well. Williams's ethnographic

Ethnography

Ethnography is a qualitative method aimed to learn and understand cultural phenomena which reflect the knowledge and system of meanings guiding the life of a cultural group...

 work on the categories informing capital punishment

Capital punishment

Capital punishment, the death penalty, or execution is the sentence of death upon a person by the state as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally...

in the United States demonstrates has also been an interest.

She was editor of the journal Transforming Anthropology.

Works

• Williams, Brackette F. 1989. "A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation Across Ethnic Terrain." Annual Review of Anthropology 18: 401– 444.
• Williams, Brackette F. 1991. Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ISBN 9780822311195.
• Williams, Brackette F. 1995. Classification Systems Revisited: Kinship, Caste, Race, and Nationality as the Flow of Blood and the Spread of Rights. In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, ed. Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney, 201-236. London: Routledge.
• Williams, Brackette F., ed. 1996. "A Race of Men, A Class of Women", Women out of place: the gender of agency and the race of nationality, Routledge, ISBN 9780415914970.
• Williams, Brackette F. 2005. "Getting out of the Hole",South Atlantic Quarterly 104(3):481-499
• Williams, Brackette F. 2008. “‘Dominando’ os bárbaros: Barbados, ativismo abolicionista e classificação da pena de morte.” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 23 (68): 23-39.
• Williams, Brackette F. 2011. Classifying to Kill: An Ethnography of the Death Penalty System in the United States. New York, NY: Berghahn Books Inc.