Profile

Dr. Biersack is a cultural anthropologist and emeritus professor at UO who entered full-time retirement in 2016. She has postgraduate training in both anthropology and history and focuses on the culture and history of Pacific peoples, primarily on the Ipili speakers of the Porgera and Paiela valleys, Papua New Guinea, whom she has been studying since the 1970s.  She has published extensively on the topics of political ecology, historical anthropology, and sex/gender, making contributions of an ethnographic and/or theoretical nature.  She is co-editor of Imagining Political Ecology (Duke University Press, 2006) and editor of “Ecologies for Tomorrow” (published in American Anthropologist, 1999), Papuan Borderlands (University of Michigan Press, 1995), and Clio in Oceania (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). Her research has been supported by National Science Foundation, Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, American Philosophical Society, the University of Oregon, and the Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon.