
Rachel Heiman
Seaside Prize Speaker 2025Rachel Heiman is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Liberal Arts Program at The New School. She received her B.A in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the generative relationship between habits, sentiments, and spaces of everyday life and emerging cultural, political, economic, and environmental conditions. She is the author of Driving after Class: Anxious Times in an American Suburb (University of California Press, 2015) and co-editor (with Carla Freeman & Mark Liechty) of The Global Middle Classes: Theorizing through Ethnography (School for Advanced Research Press, 2012). Her current project, for which she received a Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Post-Ph.D. Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and an ACLS Fellowship, brings together anthropology, urbanism, and architecture to explore emerging subjectivities, modes of citizenship, and regimes of governance amid efforts to redesign suburbia for a more sustainable future. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center, the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM and the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, and a faculty fellow at the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies. In Spring 2021, she was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center/CUNY.