Dr. Noelle Stout is a cultural anthropologist, feminist scholar, and an award-winning author and lecturer whose work focuses on the human impact of market creation and disruption. Formerly an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, Stout holds a research faculty position at Apple University and teaches at Stanford in the Sociology Department. She also serves on the editorial board of Anthropology Now.
Stout’s most recent book, Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class (University of California Press, 2019) shows how the bureaucracies of big banks hijacked federal foreclosure relief efforts after the 2008 mortgage crash. Returning to the hard-hit Sacramento Valley, where her family has lived for generations, Stout spent two years with white, Black, and Latino homeowners on the brink of eviction and the lending employees denying homeowners’ appeals for assistance. Stout’s research on the U.S. foreclosure crisis has appeared in Pacific Standard, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, 2019). It has won support from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy among others.
Dr. Noelle Stout is a cultural anthropologist, feminist scholar, and an award-winning author and lecturer whose work focuses on the human impact of market creation and disruption. Formerly an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, Stout holds a research faculty position at Apple University. She also serves on the editorial board of Anthropology Now.
Stout’s most recent book, Dispossessed: How Predatory Bureaucracy Foreclosed on the American Middle Class (University of California Press, 2019) shows how the bureaucracies of big banks hijacked federal foreclosure relief efforts after the 2008 mortgage crash. Returning to the hard-hit Sacramento Valley, where her family has lived for generations, Stout spent two years with white, Black, and Latino homeowners on the brink of eviction and the lending employees denying homeowners’ appeals for assistance. Stout’s research on the U.S. foreclosure crisis has appeared in Pacific Standard, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and Life by Algorithms: How Roboprocesses Are Remaking Our World (University of Chicago Press, 2019). It has won support from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy among others.
Stout’s first book, After Love: Queer Intimacy and Erotic Economies in Post-Soviet Cuba (Duke University Press, 2014) analyzed the shifting boundaries between labor and intimacy following the rise of the gay sex trade in Havana. After Love won the Ruth Benedict Prize, was named a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and received an Honorable Mention for the Gregory Bateson Book Prize. Collaborating with Cuban sex workers, Stout also shot and directed the feature-length documentary Luchando, named Best Documentary by the Latin Association of Entertainment Critics, and was awarded a multi-year fellowship from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab. For nearly a decade, Stout served on the executive committees of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the King Juan Carlos Center at NYU.
Stout earned a PhD and MA in anthropology at Harvard University, and a BAS and MA from Stanford University with honors and distinction. A Northern California native, Stout lives in the Bay Area with her family. She is currently conducting research for a book on gender and Artificial Intelligence.