Nancy Postero is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001 and joined the UC San Diego faculty as an Assistant Professor in September 2001, advancing to Associate Professor in 2007. Before entering academia, Postero worked as a criminal defense attorney, human rights lawyer, and radio journalist. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, politics, and political economy among indigenous peoples in Latin America, particularly through long-term fieldwork with the Guaraní people of lowland Bolivia since 1994. She examines concepts of indigeneity, neoliberal multiculturalism as a regime of citizenship, post-neoliberal developments under Evo Morales' MAS government, decolonization efforts, extractivist development models, and political performance, spectacle, ritual, and emotion in plurinational states.

Postero is the author of Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Post-Multicultural Bolivia (Stanford University Press, 2007) and The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia (University of California Press, 2017). She has co-edited volumes including Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America with Mark Goodale (Stanford University Press, 2013), Performance Politics: Spectacular Productions of Culture in Contemporary Latin America with Nicole Fabricant (Identities, 2013), and special journal issues such as Political Anthropology in the Age of Post-Politics (Anthropology Theory, 2019). Her articles appear in journals like Latin American Research Review, Anthropology Quarterly, and Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. At UC San Diego, she served as Co-Director of the Human Rights Program and Co-Director of the International Institute, Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies, and on numerous committees. She received teaching awards from Eleanor Roosevelt College (2006), Marshall College (2007), Latin American Studies (2009, 2014), and UCSD Panhellenic Conference (2014), along with research funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Hellman Foundation, UC MEXUS, and UC Humanities Research Institute. Postero was a visiting scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies at the Catholic University of Chile (2014-2015) and serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.

Professional Email: npostero@ucsd.edu