Casey Golomski

Casey Golomski is a cultural and medical anthropologist of Southern Africa who works mainly with communities in eSwatini (Swaziland) and South Africa. His humanistic and field-based research focuses on religion, health, and gender across the life course, surrounding perennial questions of life, death, and their thresholds.

Based on years of field research, his first book, 'Funeral Culture - AIDS, Work, and Cultural Change in an African Kingdom' (Indiana University Press, 2018), is the first and yet only comprehensive account of the AIDS epidemic in Africa's last absolute monarchy, the Kingdom of eSwatini, also the country with the world's highest HIV prevalence for more than 15 years. Through the voices of people in rural and urban communities, churches, businesses, and NGOs, the book documents how citizens' grassroots responses to the epidemic drove changes and innovations in cultural and care practices that counteract what the state deems to be authentically 'traditional.' These findings show comparatively how disease epidemics, whether AIDS or COVID-19, are grounds for people to engage in cultural and political reform through ideologies of 'work.'

His recent and ongoing research explores the effects of racist policies and practices on long term care for older adults in South Africa. By way of an old age home housing older white and black residents born at the start of apartheid being cared for by younger black staff of the 'born-free' post-apartheid generation, this project considers how people behold the legacies of racist violence and historical atrocities at the end of life. In addition to articles on aspects and histories of elder care, he is currently writing a biographically driven, creative non-fiction book that introduces readers to a diverse set of individuals living and working there--widows both young and old, vernacular healers and biomedical practitioners, former colonialists and anti-colonialist freedom fighters, and Nelson Mandela's Robben Island prison nurse--whose lives illuminate what it means to age in the 'new' South Africa and other multiracial, postcolonial countries globally.

Funded by three Fulbright Fellowships, the Wenner Gren, Reed, Mellon, and Teagle Foundations, and institutional grants, his research and creative writing has been published in a range of anthropology, African studies, and literary journals as well as several edited volumes. As an invited speaker, he has given talks at Emory, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Wisconsin, and Michigan State and the Universities of Johannesburg, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Witwatersrand in South Africa where he is an ongoing Visiting Researcher. Previously, he consulted for UNICEF and was an associate editor for the African Journal of AIDS Research. Currently, he is a board member for the Northeastern Workshops on Southern Africa (NEWSA) and Seacoast African American Cultural Center (SAACC) where he supervises the student internship program and public cultural education through curation of their material culture collection. He is also a classical musician as a long-term member of the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra and a published poet, being recently awarded the Society for Humanistic Anthropology First Prize in Poetry.

He is always happy to meet with and advise interested students and consult for community, public, and private organizations.