Rate My Professor Willi Lempert

William (Willi) Lempert serves as the Osterweis Family Associate Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College, a position he assumed in 2025 following his tenure promotion that year and initial appointment as Assistant Professor in 2018. His academic background includes a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2018, with a dissertation titled Palya Futures: The Social Life of Kimberley Aboriginal Media; an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Denver in 2010; and a BPhil, Honors with Distinction, in Interdisciplinary Studies (Anthropology minor) from Miami University in 2007. Lempert holds concurrent roles as Associated Research Fellow at the Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame Australia since 2014, and previously served as Contributing Editor for Cultural Anthropology from 2014 to 2018 and Fulbright Visiting Researcher at the Australian National University in 2016.

Lempert's research specializations encompass the implications of Aboriginal Australian representations for community futures, based on nearly three years of ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous media organizations in Northwestern Australia's Kimberley region from 2012 to 2019. His major publication, Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2025), traces filmmaking as a critical mode of social and political transformation, centering on projects by Kukatja elder and filmmaker Mark Moora. Key peer-reviewed articles include “Indigenous Media Futures: An Introduction” (Cultural Anthropology, 2018), “Generative Hope in the Postapocalyptic Present” (Cultural Anthropology, 2018), and “Gesturing Across Settler Divides in Marumpu Wangka! Kukatja Hand Talk” (Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 2019); book chapters such as “Phrenology in Space: Legacies of Scientific Racism in Classifying Extraterrestrial Intelligence” (Reclaiming Space, Oxford University Press, 2023). Emerging interests cover Aboriginal sign language and hearing loss alongside outer space colonialism, informed by collaborations with SETI scientists, Indigenous studies scholars, and Native science fiction filmmakers. Among his awards and fellowships are the Wenner-Gren Engaged Anthropology Grant (2019), Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2017), Fulbright IIE US Scholar Program Research Grant (2014), and Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2014). Lempert contributes to public discourse through lectures, editorial work, and innovative teaching projects like the Pejepscot Portage Mapping Project at Bowdoin.