About Kiran C. Jayaram
Kiran Jayaram is an Associate Professor (Anthropology) at the University of South Florida.
Previously, he held a faculty position at the City University of New York (York College) and a
postdoctoral fellowship at the Faculté d’Ethnologie (Haiti). He earned his Ph.D. in applied
anthropology at Columbia University/Teachers College (2014). He focuses his anthropological
research on education, mobility, and political economy and has given university lectures in Haiti,
the Dominican Republic, and India. In addition to his scholarship, he worked as a consultant for
the World Bank of primary schooling projects in Haiti and gave expert testimony for Haitian
asylum seekers in the US. He held leadership positions in the Haiti-Dominican Republic Section
(LASA) and the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (AAA), and co-
founded the Transnational Hispaniola Collective. He was Acting Editor-in-Chief and special
Guest Co-Editor of the 2022 special issue of JLACA celebrating Caribbeanist anthropology. He
has published several articles and book chapters, as well as two co-edited volumes, Keywords of
Mobility (2016) and Transnational Hispaniola (2018). In addition to continuing to publish in
Caribbean Studies, his current comparative research project examines how student learning,
pedagogy, and institutional contexts create anthropologists. He has received funding to support
his activities from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Institute
for International Education (Fulbright), the American Jewish World Service, the Kansas Board
of Regents, and many internal awards from the University of South Florida, the City University
of New York, Columbia University, Teachers College (Columbia University), the University of
Kansas, and Johnson County Community College.