Professor Emeritus of Anthropology; Distinguished Teaching Award, 1997

BA, Connecticut College; MA, PhD, Boston University
Email: kdonahue@plymouth.edu

About Professor Donahue

Dr. Katherine Donahue has done field work in France, Tanzania, New England, and Alaska. Her work in France has focused on the political economy of Montbéliard, near Switzerland and Germany and on West African musicians in Paris. She attended the trial in Alexandria, VA, of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen accused of conspiracy in planning the attacks of 9/11, and has published a book and several articles about that case. She received a Whiting Foundation Fellowship to do field work in Alaska and published a book, co-authored with Dr. David Switzer, on photographs in PSU’s McGoldrick Collection taken in Alaska in 1886 during the revenue cutter Bear’s first Arctic patrol. Donahue is also conducting research on the sustainability of recreational boating. Together with Plymouth State colleagues in geography, sociology, and biology she has taken students to France, Tanzania, and the Olympic Peninsula, Washington.

Selected publications

• Donahue, Katherine C. 2018. “Tanzanite: Commodity Fiction or Commodity Nightmare?” in Between the Plough and the Pick: Informal, artisanal and small-scale mining in the contemporary world. Kuntala Lahiri-Pick, ed. Canberra: Australian  National University.
• Donahue, Katherine C. 2017. “Frozen thought: Physical representations of power and the rebuilding of Ground Zero” In Journal of Urban Cultural Studies. Volume 4, Numbers 1-2, 1 July 2017, pp. 283-301(19).
• Donahue, Katherine C. and David C. Switzer. 2014. Steaming to the North: The First Summer Cruise of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear, Alaska and Chukotka, Siberia, 1886. Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska Press.
• Donahue, Katherine C. 2011. “What are Heroes For?: Commemoration and the Creation  of Heroes after 9/11”  In Focus. Anthropology News. August 29, 2011.
• Donahue, Katherine C. 2009. “The Slave of Allah vs. the Slave of Satan: Evil and the Trial of Zacarias Moussaoui” in Inside and Outside the Law: Perspectives on Evil, Law and the State, edited by Shubhankar Dam and Jonathan Hall, Oxford: Interdisciplinary.Net.
• Donahue, Katherine C. 2007. Slave of Allah: Zacarias Moussaoui vs. The USA. London: Pluto Press.

• Donahue, Katherine C. 2008. “The Religious Trajectories of the Moussaoui Family.”  ISIM Review.  Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World. (ISIM) 21:18-19.

Selected Awards or Recognition

Whiting Foundation Fellowships, 2009 (Research in Alaska) and 1999 (Research in France)
New Hampshire Sea Grant Award to Brian Eisenhauer and Katherine Donahue, 2006
Distinguished Teaching Award, 1997.
National Endowment for the Humanities Travel to Collections Grant No. FE-26200-91.
Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological  Research Grant No. 5209.

Courses Taught

• Cultural Anthropology
• Culture Ecology
• Anthropology of Religion, Ritual, and Myth
• Economic Anthropology
• Anthropology of Europe
• Anthropology of Sub-Saharan Africa
• The Ice Age (co-taught with Dr. Bryon Middlekauff)
• Illness, Wellness, and Healing (co-taught with Dr. Robert Heiner)

Other

2012  Lecture: “Slave of Allah” Denver World Affairs Council, Denver, CO

2011  Discussant of panel:  “The Legacy of Resource Extraction: Public Concerns, Corporate Expansion, and Shifting Politics” and presenter of paper “The Ocean is Our Garden: Conflict over Water Rights in Point Hope, Alaska”, Anthropology and the Environment Section, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada.

2009  Co-organizer (with Deborah Reed-Danahay) and Chair of panel: “Lévi-Strauss, Europe, and the Ends of Anthropology,” Presidential Session, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA.