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Kay Warren earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Princeton University in 1974 and served on the senior faculties of Princeton and Harvard before coming to Brown in 2003. She is the Charles C. Tillinghast Jr. '32 Professor of International Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. She holds a joint appointment between the Anthropology Department and the Watson Institute for International Studies where she is a Professor (Research).

Warren's field reseach has taken her to Guatemala, Peru, Japan, Sweden, Norway, Colombia, and Washington, D.C. Her research involves multi-sited ethnographic studies of foreign aid and transnationalism, trafficking in persons, war and community responses to violence and peace processes, social movements and activist intellectuals, political minorities, indigenous rights, gender, religion, and the anthropology of multi-cultural democracies. She also works on documentary film and media issues. Her current research involves a multi-sited examination of major foreign aid donors and their production of knowledge about the developing world.

Warren's honors and awards over the last decade include an Honorary Doctorate and the Olof Palme Professorship at Stockholm University, a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in Japan and visiting scholar position at the University of Tokyo, a visiting professorship at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, an Abe Fellowship to Japan, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for work in Guatemala, a post-doctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fellowship for work in Guatemala.

She is currently working on two book projects: "Human Trafficking, Global Solutions, and Local Realities across the Pacific Rim" and "Remaking Transnationalism: Japan, Foreign Aid, and the Search for Global Solutions," co-edited with David Leheny.

Warren's other books include Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation, and the State, co-edited with Jean Jackson (2002); Ethnography in Unstable Places: Everyday Life in Contexts of Dramatic Political Change, co-edited with Carol Greenhouse and Beth Mertz (2002); Indigenous Movements and Their Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (1998); The Violence Within: Cultural and Political Opposition in Divided Nations, edited (1993); Women of the Andes: Patriarchy and Social Change in Two Peruvian Towns, coauthored with Susan Bourque (1981); and The Symbolism of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemalan Town (1979).

Download Kay Warren's Curriculum Vitae in PDF Format