Anthropologist. Author.

Cynthia J. Browne is a social-cultural anthropologist, writer, and media practitioner and currently holds a position as Research Scholar in the Department “Knowledge Systems and Collective Life,” directed by Dr. Etienne Benson, at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, Germany. There she leads a working group on the knowledge and politics of exposure. Her post-doctoral research spans socio-cultural anthropology, German media studies, feminist science and technology studies (STS) and documentary practice, with a focus on the afterlives of resource extraction across differently situated bodies and landscapes.

Her research has been supported by an array of institutions, among them the DAAD (Germany), the National Science Foundation (US), the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. Previous research affliations include the Graduate Research Training Program “Documentary Practices: Excess and Privation” at the Ruhr University in Bochum, the Film Study Center at Harvard University, and the Sensory Ethnography Lab in Cambridge, MA, among others.

She received her PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology with a secondary field in Critical Media Practice from Harvard University in 2019.