Virginia R. Domínguez facts for kids

Virginia Dominguez (born in 1952) is an expert in anthropology. Anthropology is the study of human societies and cultures. She also specializes in legal anthropology, which looks at how laws and justice work in different cultures. Currently, she is a respected professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Early Life and Travels

Virginia Dominguez was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1952. Her family left Cuba in 1960. After that, Virginia attended elementary and middle school in several places. These included New York, San Juan (Puerto Rico), and Bergen County (New Jersey). She went to high school in Montevideo, Uruguay.

Her family moved often because of her father's work in international business. After finishing high school in 1968, she lived with her parents in Guadalajara, Mexico. This was before she started college in 1969.

In 1969, Virginia was one of the first women to attend Yale University. She was part of Yale's first class that included both men and women. During her college years, her parents lived in Beirut, Lebanon. She would join them there during school breaks. A famous anthropologist named Sidney Mintz helped her discover her interest in this field. She graduated from Yale in 1973 with a high honors degree.

Her Research and Ideas

Dr. Dominguez has written a lot about important topics. These include how people are grouped by race and identity. She also studies how laws work in different societies. She looks at how we know things and what counts as proof in anthropology. Her work also covers how cultures connect across the world.

One of her books, White by Definition, came from her early research. It explores ideas of race and identity in Creole Louisiana. In the 1980s, she started studying Jewish identity in Israel. She published a book about this in 1989 called People as Subject, People as Object.

More recently, Dr. Dominguez has focused on questions about evidence. She explores how anthropologists decide what is true and how they use information.

Her Career Journey

Virginia Dominguez earned her master's degree in 1975 and her Ph.D. in 1979 from Yale University. From 1976 to 1979, she was a Junior Fellow at Harvard. After getting her doctorate, she taught at Duke University from 1979 to 1991. She also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for a year.

Later, she taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Iowa. In 2001, she taught in Budapest, Hungary. In 2007, she joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, she is a special professor of anthropology. She is also part of the Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Caribbean Studies programs.

Dr. Dominguez has also been a director at a famous school in Paris. She was a professor at the University of Manchester in the UK. She was also a research fellow in Honolulu, Hawaii.

She has received many grants for her research projects. These grants came from important groups like the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. In 1995, she was invited to give the special Morgan Lectures. She has written or edited ten books. She has also edited many issues of the journal American Ethnologist. She has written nearly 100 academic articles and book chapters.

Dr. Dominguez co-founded the International Forum for U.S. Studies in 1995. She also co-edits its book series. From 2002 to 2007, she was the editor of American Ethnologist. She has also served on the boards of twelve other academic journals. From 2009 to 2011, she was the President of the American Anthropological Association.

As President, she hosted a podcast series called “Inside the President’s Studio.” In these podcasts, she interviewed many anthropologists. Dr. Dominguez also helped start "Anthropologists without Borders." In 2013, this organization was officially set up in Brazil.

Selected Books

• 1986 White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana. This book looks at how people were grouped by race in Creole Louisiana.
• 1989 People as Subject, People as Object: Selfhood and Peoplehood in Contemporary Israel. This book explores identity and community in Israel.
• 1997 Evaluating Human Genetic Diversity. She was a co-author on this report. It discusses human genetic differences and human rights.