Pembroke Center

Luke Forrester (he/him) is a psychological anthropologist of race, sexuality, and religion in the francophone world. He holds a combined Ph.D. in anthropology and interdisciplinary humanities from Princeton University and a BA in anthropology from Yale University.

 His first book project focuses on white French people in Paris, Martinique, and Benin who exclusively or predominantly date Black people. By situating their fantasies and desires in the national, imperial, and developmental contexts in which they took root, Forrester rethinks the vexed relationship between psychoanalysis and anti-racist ethnography. Forrester’s second ethnographic project centers on spirit possession, ethnopsychiatry, and biopolitics on Réunion Island, a French département roughly 400 miles east of Madagascar.

Forrester’s work has appeared in SubStance and symplokē and has been supported by the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust.