Bartholomew Dean

Dr. Bartholomew Dean

Director, Neotropical Anthropology Laboratory (NAL)

Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain & Ireland

Professor of Anthropology, University of Kansas

Dr. Bartholomew Crispin Dean is a social anthropologist whose scholarship, institution-building, and public engagement have shaped the study of Amazonia, Indigenous rights, political violence, and global public health for more than three decades. He is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kansas and Director of the Neotropical Anthropology Laboratory, where he leads internationally engaged, interdisciplinary research integrating ethnography, medicine, digital humanities, museum practice, and policy-oriented public anthropology across Latin America and the Global South.

Educated at Harvard University (Ph.D., Anthropology; A.M., Anthropology of Social Change & Development), the University of Oxford (M.Phil., Latin American Studies), and Washington University in St. Louis (A.B. Honors, Anthropology & History), Dean has maintained a continuous ethnographic and historical research presence in the Peruvian Amazon since 1988. His work is grounded in long-term partnerships with Indigenous communities, particularly Urarina, Shawi, Kukama-Kukamiria, and Awajún peoples, and in sustained collaboration with Peruvian public universities, museums, and health institutions. His research engages kinship and political economy, governance and postcolonial citizenship, violence and social trauma, health inequity and structural violence, migration and urbanization, and the moral afterlives of colonialism and armed conflict.

Dean is the author of The End of the Future: Trauma, Memory, and Reconciliation in Peruvian Amazonia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2023), selected for JSTOR’s Path to Open initiative, and of Urarina Society, Cosmology and History in Peruvian Amazonia (University Press of Florida) and The State and the Awajún: Frontier Expansion in the Upper Amazon, 1541–1990 (Cognella). He is co-editor, with Jerome Levi, of At the Risk of Being Heard: Identity, Indigenous Rights and Postcolonial States (University of Michigan Press), recipient of the American Library Association Award for Social and Behavioral Sciences. His research has appeared in leading venues including American Ethnologist, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Quarterly, Health & Human Rights, Ethnohistory, Museum Anthropology, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Since 1999, he has served as Contributing Editor for “Ethnology of Lowland South America” in the Handbook of Latin American Studies (U.S. Library of Congress).

A defining feature of Dean’s career has been sustained institution-building in Amazonia. He was a co-founder and coordinator of Peru’s first Graduate Program in Amazonian Studies at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, strengthened through a MacArthur Foundation initiative supporting scholarships, field research, and program development. He has held long-standing academic appointments in Peru, including Professor Ad-Honorem positions in Yurimaguas and Tarapoto and multiple Fulbright appointments, and has received major honors from Peruvian public universities, including the Orden Mons. José Luis Astigarraga Lizarralde (2018) and the Premio a la Excelencia Académica en Investigación Amazónica (2013).

Dean’s museum and heritage work reflects a commitment to ethical stewardship and collaborative governance. He is Founder and Director of the Division of Anthropology at the Museo Regional of the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Tarapoto, advising on registration and cultural patrimony in coordination with Peru’s Ministry of Culture. He has led significant ethnographic collection initiatives in Peru and the United States and is internationally recognized for pioneering ethical digital repatriation methodologies that provide Indigenous communities with collaborative digital access to material culture and archival recordings held abroad. In partnership with Indigenous collaborators, he has also overseen the preservation and permanent archiving of extensive Urarina audio recordings, now housed at the California Language Archive through coordination with the University of California, Berkeley.

In global public health, Dean’s research bridges anthropology and clinical science to examine diabetes, metabolic inequality, and health systems in Indigenous and low-resource settings. As principal investigator on multiple funded initiatives, he has investigated the genetic, environmental, and political determinants of metabolic disease in Amazonian populations, with findings presented at the American Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions and published in interdisciplinary venues. At NAL, he leads collaborations linking anthropology, nutrition science, medicine, and digital health infrastructure, including equity-focused work on offline-first electronic health records designed to counter digital exclusion in remote Amazonian regions.

Sustained human rights engagement complements Dean's scholarship. Since 2001, he has served as a pro bono expert witness and consultant in asylum and Convention Against Torture cases before U.S. immigration courts, providing authoritative testimony on political violence, persecution, Indigenous rights, and social trauma. He serves on the Board of Directors of The Clinic, a non-profit immigration defense organization, and has advised governmental and non-governmental organizations on human rights, Indigenous affairs, and public health, including expert documentation of political violence during Peru’s internal armed conflict.

As Director of the Neotropical Anthropology Laboratory, Dean brings together research, teaching, and public service within a shared ethical framework. Under his leadership, NAL advances rigorous scholarship and durable partnerships dedicated to confronting health inequity, historical violence, digital exclusion, and the politics of cultural heritage through collaborative, equity-oriented anthropology.