Robin Sheriff

Robin E. Sheriff is a cultural anthropologist with a BA from Bard College and a PhD (1997) in Anthropology from the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. Her previous work concerns race and racism in Brazil, with a focus on Rio de Janeiro. In documenting how racism is experienced by ordinary Brazilians of African descent, she contributed to a growing national discussion that led to significant policy changes in Brazil. She has published articles in American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology and the Journal of Latin American Anthropology. Her book Dreaming Equality: Color, Race and Racism in Urban Brazil (Rutgers 2001) describes her 20 months of fieldwork in a hillside favela in Rio.

Robin Sheriff’s current work focuses on nighttime dreaming and its links to history, culture, and sociality. Growing out of her UNH seminar on the anthropology of dreaming, this research investigates the dreams of emerging adults in the US, giving special attention to the ways in which late millennials and Gen Z have responded to changing media ecologies and new technologies in both waking and dreaming states. Her articles, “Dreaming of the Kardashians” (Ethos 2017), “Mobile Dreaming” (Subjectivity 2019), and “Young Americans Dreaming in the Specular Age” (with Jeanette Mageo, Ethos 2019), for example, offer novel perspectives on the shifts in consciousness and subjectivity occasioned by smartphones, reality television, and social media among US college students. With Jeannette Mageo, she is co-editor of New Directions in the Anthropology of Dreaming (Routledge 2021) which brings together research from around the world. Her chapters include a comprehensive review of the English-language literature in the anthropology of dreaming and “Dreaming Bloody Murder,” an exploration of young women’s fascination with true crime.  More recently, her analysis of emerging adults’ dreams about piloting out-of-control cars, “Driving While Dreaming,” appears in Mobilities (2024). Her current work in progress centers the ways in which Gen Z women imagine their reproductive futures—in both nocturnal and daytime states.