Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Texas, Austin
About
Celeste Henery is a cultural anthropologist working at the intersection of race, gender, and health. Her work explores what it means to feel well, individually and collectively, in a world crosscut by inequality. Her dissertation research on black women’s wellness and intimacy in Brazil is the subject of published and forthcoming articles and a book The Balance of Souls. She has continued this research on wellness through work with the Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where she and a team oversaw a mental health literacy survey of the San Antonio Housing Authority.
She also collected oral histories (2009–2011) for the Texas After Violence Project—an organization capturing the broader effects of violence and the death penalty in Texas in a range of lives including family members of death row inmates and murder victims, to attorneys, prison staff, and activists. In her free time, she enjoys the outdoors, dancing, running, riding her bike, and writing on array of musings including family lineage, the nuances of human connection, and women and athletics.
Current Work:
Recently, Dr. Henery has written expert affidavits for post-conviction habeas corpus proceedings in Texas. This work involves constructing a social, cultural history of death-sentenced individuals from in-depth interviews and research. She is a research associate in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at UT, where she investigates racial and gender legibility and is rethinking paradigms of black community.
Research Area(s)
- African Diaspora Studies
- Critical Race and Gender Studies
