Kathleen M. Adams

Kathleen M. Adams is a cultural anthropologist, Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London,[1] Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago,[2] and an Adjunct Curator at the Field Museum of Natural History. Adams is known for her research on cultural transformations in island Southeast Asia, (especially Toraja society in Indonesia), and her contributions to critical tourism studies, heritage studies, and museum studies. Her award-winning books include Art as Politics: Re-crafting Identities, Tourism and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia and The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond (with N. Leite and Q. Casteneda)'. Adams's additional books are Intersections of Tourism, Migration, and Exile (with N. Bloch), Everyday Life in Southeast Asia (With K. Gillogly), Indonesia: History, Heritage, Culture, and Home and Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity Politics in South and Southeast Asia (with S. Dickey).

Adams received an anthropology B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an M.A./Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of Washington. Prior to joining the faculty at Loyola University Chicago, Adams held the Mouat Family Endowed Chair for Junior Faculty [3] at Beloit College. She was also the Isaac Menasseh Meyer Fellow at the National University of Singapore's Centre for Advanced Study (Isaac Manasseh Meyer Fellowship , 1999). (1999), a visiting professor at Loyola University Chicago's John Felice Rome Center (2008-2009), Ateneo de Manila University (2016), Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (2016), [4] and at The Center for Tourism Research at Wakayama University (2020-2023). She has also taught on several University of Virginia Semester at Sea voyages.[5]

Adams' book on the politics of art and tourism in Sulawesi (Indonesia)[6] won the Alpha Sigma Nu award as the best social science book published in 2007–2009 by faculty at Jesuit institutions.[7] (Indonesian version, 2022). Her book The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond(co-edited with Leite and Casteneda) received the 2020 American Anthropological Association ATIG award for best 2nd and beyond book in the Anthropoloy of Tourism.[8] A Fulbright recipient,[9] Adams' research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society, the Henry R. Luce Foundation and other foundations. She has received Loyola University's Sujack Master Researcher Award twice (2016, 2020),[10] Loyola University Chicago's 2007 Sujack Award for Teaching Excellence, and recognition by Princeton Review as one of the "300 best professors" in the US and Canada in 2012.[11]