Dr. Luke Eric Lassiter received his PhD in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. He is professor of humanities and anthropology and Director of the Graduate Humanities Program. Before accepting his current position at Marshall in 2005, he taught anthropology at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where he was also a Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry Fellow. He has published widely in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, and cultural studies. His books include The Power of Kiowa Song, Invitation to Anthropology, The Other Side of Middletown, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography, Doing Ethnography Today, and, most recently, I’m Afraid of that Water: A Collaborative Ethnography of a West Virginia Water Crisis, which received a Weatherford Award for best books about Appalachia. He founded the journal Collaborative Anthropologies in 2008 and served as editor until 2013. Lassiter is a recipient of the prestigious Margaret Mead Award and is a nationally and internationally recognized scholar. He has consulted for a variety of organizations, including the Smithsonian Institution, United States National Park Service, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Irish Research Council, and the United Kingdom’s National Centre for Research Methods. He has delivered invited lectures throughout the US and abroad, including at Princeton University, Dartmouth College, University of Michigan, University of British Columbia, University of Edinburgh, University of Nottingham, and Lund University, among many others. In 2023, Lassiter received an honorary doctorate from Malmö University (Sweden), along with his wife and colleague Elizabeth Campbell, awarded for their writings on collaborative ethnography, a research approach that engages researchers and local community participants in reciprocal processes of community-based scholarship.