Jane Lynch

Jane Lynch is Lecturer and Associate Research Scientist in the Department of Anthropology and serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for South Asian Studies. An economic anthropologist with regional expertise in South Asia, her research interests include the social analysis of corporations and corporate social responsibility projects; the political economy of artisanal manufacture; studies of materiality and material culture; and the anthropology of ethical commerce.

Her current book project, Goods and Goodness: Ethical Practices in India’s Artisanal Textile Industry, is based on long-term ethnographic research examining tensions and contradictions in the social and institutional organization of the artisanal textile industry in India. Fieldwork for this project, which focuses on the negotiation of ethical values within the context of commercial relationships and transactions, was conducted in multiple sites including textile markets and warehouses, bureaucratic offices, corporate shareholder meetings, design studios, and historic weaving towns. This research has been supported by fellowships from Fulbright and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, among others.

She teaches classes on ethnographic research and writing; the relationships between corporations and communities; commodities and consumer culture as they illuminate the ways in which ethics and morality both intersect with and are embedded in economic life; and the political economy and history of South Asia through the textile industry. Before coming to Yale, Lynch taught in the Residential College at the University of Michigan where she was head of the Social Theory & Practice program.

She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, M.A. in Social Science from the University of Chicago, and B.A. with honors in Anthropology from Columbia University.