Irma McClaurin

I am a first-generation college attendee who went to a vocational high school in Chicago, Illinois. I tell people I was born a poet and became an anthropologist. My career in higher education started in admissions at Mount Holyoke College, where I believe I was the first Assistant Director of Minority Admissions in 1974. I stayed there until 1977, when I started work as an assistant at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the transfer admissions office. I stayed in that office from 1977 until 1983-84, when I moved to become an Assistant Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and an adjunct in the Women's Studies Department. I really did my administrative career as staff assistant, Associate Director, Director of Publications. I helped to create the university's articulation agreement with the 15 community colleges and the university. I went back to school in 1987 to get a master's and a PhD in anthropology, and as they say, the rest is history. That took me down a road of moving away from administration into teaching in anthropology. In 2001, I published what really created a new canon called Black Feminist Anthropology, Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics. That was a book that won an outstanding academic title, and in 2024, we just published the 25th anniversary of that book. I was a tenured professor at the University of Florida and also at the University of Minnesota in anthropology. I gave up both of them and went on to do some other things - I've had many different careers. I'm also a former culture and education editor at Insight News, which is a black newspaper in Minneapolis.