Professor Riché Barnes

Riché J. Daniel Barnes

Riché J. Daniel Barnes is currently a visiting professor in the department of Afro-American studies at Smith College, completing her dissertation in the department of Anthropology at Emory University where she is a non-resident graduate fellow in the Sloan Foundation Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life.  Riché holds an MA in Anthropology from Emory University, an MS in Urban Studies from Georgia State University, and a BA in Political Science from Spelman College. 

Riché specializes in race, class, and gender dynamics in African American families as they are experienced in the U.S. political economy.  Her dissertation project is an ethnographic exploratory study of professional middle class mothers and their families in Atlanta, Georgia where she illuminates the intersectional experiences of African American professional middle class married mothers who daily negotiate middle class identity, gender formation and strategy, and their invisibility in scholarship and policies pertaining to marriage, family and work.  Her most recent publication is a chapter in the volume The Changing Landscape of Work and Family in the American Middle Class (2008) where she refutes commonly held iterations of work and family conflict.  While teaching at Spelman College Riché explored cultural shifts in Ghana and Uganda as women join the workforce in increasing numbers.  This research was part of a collaborative research group funded by the National Science Foundation and though the funding period has ended Riché intends to continue these inquiries in her future research, broadening her focus on gender, motherhood, work and family to women in Africa and the African Diaspora.

Riché has received numerous fellowships and awards including the Ford Foundation Dissertation Award (2004) and the Marjorie Shostak Prize in Humanistic Ethnographic Writing for an excerpt from her dissertation (2007).

Since joining the faculty Riché has taught Introduction to Black Culture, Black Feminist Theory, Anthropology of the African Diaspora, Culture and Class in Afro-American Families and looks forward to adding Afro-American Autobiography and Black Women, Work and Family to her course offerings.