Biography:Roy Richard Grinker

From HandWiki
Short description: American anthropologist
Roy Richard Grinker
Alma materGrinnell College (B.A. 1983)
Harvard (M.A. 1985)
Harvard (Ph.D. 1989)
OccupationAuthor, professor
Websitehttp://www.royrichardgrinker.com

Roy Richard Grinker (born 1961) is an American author and Professor of anthropology, international affairs, and human sciences at The George Washington University.[1]

Grinker is an authority on North and South Korea n relations.[2] As part of his PhD research, he spent two years living with the Lese farmers and the Efé pygmies in the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo as a Fulbright scholar. He has also conducted epidemiological research on autism in Korea.[3]

Grinker is also editor of Anthropological Quarterly.[4] He has also written op-ed articles for the The New York Times and appeared as a guest on PBS NewsHour.[5]

His latest book, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness, was included in the New York Time's editor's choice list for the week of February 4, 2021. [6][7]

Publications

Grinker has published a number of books on multiple topics - Africa, Korea, and autism.[8]

  • Houses in the Rainforest: Ethnicity and Inequality among Farmers and Foragers in Northeastern Zaire (ISBN:0520089758, University of California Press, 1994)
  • (with Christopher B. Steiner) Perspectives on Africa: A Reader in Culture, History and Representation (ISBN:1557866864, Blackwell Publishers, 1997)
  • Korea and its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War (ISBN:0312224729, St. Martin's Press, 1998)
  • In the Arms of Africa: The Life of Colin Turnbull (ISBN:0226309045, University of Chicago Press, 2000)
  • Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism (ISBN:0465027636, Basic Books, 2007)
  • Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness (ISBN:978-0-393-53164-0, Norton, 2021)

Personal life

Grinker was born and raised in Chicago . He graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in 1979, Grinnell College in 1983, and received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University in 1989.[8][9]

His paternal grandfather, Roy R. Grinker, Sr. founded the Psychiatry Department at the University of Chicago and was the founding editor of the Archives of General Psychiatry.[8]

His book on autism, Unstrange Minds, was in part an "attempt to make sense of an intensely personal issue: his own daughter's autism".[8]

References