Erin L. Durban

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Erin L. Durban is a professor of anthropology and critical disability studies at the University of Minnesota. They wrote The Sexual Politics of Empire: Postcolonial Homophobia in Haiti, which won the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies and the National Women’s Studies/University of Illinois Press First Book Prize. The book helped establish queer Haitian studies and explores how colonialism and U.S. imperialism shaped gender and sexuality in Haiti and its diaspora. Durban’s work also includes Anthropology and Ableism, which looks at ableism and disability accessibility in ethnographic research.

Durban has been active in social justice since the early 2000s and received the Mario Savio Young Activist Award for human rights work. They earned an individualized BA in International Politics: Race, Class, Gender, and Liberation from Metropolitan State University of Denver in 2006 and a PhD in gender and women’s studies from the University of Arizona. Their dissertation, Postcolonial Homophobia: United States Imperialism in Haiti and the Transnational Circulation of Anti-Gay Sexual Politics, won the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize. They also served as managing editor of Feminist Formations during graduate school.

After teaching at Illinois State University, Durban joined the University of Minnesota faculty in 2017. In 2020, they received the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship. From 2020 to 2023, Durban was the elected Chair of the Association for Queer Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association.

Durban’s first book draws on their dissertation and later research, and is considered the first book-length ethnography in queer Haitian studies. It combines history, ethnography, and archival data to tell a powerful story of postcolonial homophobia and imperial impact.

Durban is married to Dr. Miranda Joseph, author and chair of the gender, women and sexuality studies department at the University of Minnesota. Durban’s previous marriage ended in divorce.