Rate My Professor Cynthia Fowler

Dr. Cynthia Fowler serves as Chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Wofford College. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in anthropology from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa in 1999. Fowler joined Wofford College in August 2005 and has since advanced to full professor and department chair. Her teaching includes courses such as introduction to cultural anthropology, global health, ecological and medical anthropology. Committed to engaged scholarship, she participates in local organizations like the Polk County Fire and Rescue Advisory Council and serves on Wofford’s Post-Graduate Scholarships Committee and the Committee for Non-Curricular Faculty Concerns. She received the Covington Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Social Sciences and Humanities from Wofford College in 2020 and the Exemplary Teacher of the Year Award from The United Methodist Church’s General Board of Higher Education and Ministry in 2018.

Fowler's research specializations encompass biosocial dynamics, fire ecology, freshwater and marine biology, and science and technology studies. Her work examines the human dimensions of fire ecology in the southern Blue Ridge Mountains and the Indo-Australian Monsoon Zone, including ethnographic evaluations of anthropogenic fires in ecosystems. Recent fieldwork in Indonesia, particularly on Sumba Island, investigates how language practices reflect changing waterscapes and links global change to global health among agropastoralists, funded by a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award in 2023 and the American Institute of Indonesian Studies and Council of American Overseas Research Centers in 2025. Key publications include Fire Otherwise: Ethnobiology of Burning for a Changing World (2018, co-editor), Biosocial Synchrony on Sumba: Multispecies Interactions and Environmental Variations in Indonesia (2016), and Ignition Stories: Indigenous Fire Ecology in the Indo-Australian Monsoon Zone (2013). She has contributed numerous peer-reviewed articles, such as 'Pyrosociality: The Power of Fire in Transforming the Blue Ridge Mountain Ecoregion' (Environment and Society, 2023) and 'A global expert elicitation on present-day human–fire interactions' (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2025). Fowler served as President of the Society of Ethnobiology Board from 2017 to 2019, co-founded and co-edits Ethnobiology Letters, sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Pyrogeography, and co-edits monograph series Global Change/Global Health and Contributions in Ethnobiology.