Ivan Karp's Publications: An Online Archive

Ivan Karp was National Endowment for the Humanities Professor in the Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts and co-director of the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship (CSPS) until his retirement in May 2011. He passed away on September 17, 2011.

Karp’s work has had a broad influence in anthropology, African studies, museum studies, African philosophy, public scholarship and many other fields. This online archive of his publications is intended to make that work widely available. The links provide lists of Karp’s books and downloads of his articles, as well as lists of the works published in the two book series for which he served as editor. The archive also includes several videos of Karp’s presentations and In Memoriam tributes to him.

Karp’s articles have been grouped into four themes, although many of his papers address more than one of these areas. T.O. Beidelman offers an overview of Karp’s work in an article published in African Studies Review in 2012. Karp’s fieldnotes and other unpublished papers and photographs have been donated to the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. A guide to the Ivan Karp collection has been prepared to assist researchers.

Karp received many honors and awards during his career, among them: the Marion Creekmore Award for significant contributions to internationalizing Emory (2005); a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to establish Institutions of Public Culture, a program of fellowships and student awards that linked Emory University and selected institutions in Cape Town, South Africa (2000-08); a Ford Foundation grant in support of Area Studies under the Crossing Borders: Cultural Studies and Area Studies Initiative (1997); a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to support postdoctoral humanities fellowships at the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship (1996-2000); a Special Award from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Museums for research on Museums and the Cultural Imagination (1992); a Rockefeller Foundation-Smithsonian Institution grant for conferences on Museums and Communities and Exhibiting Cultures (1987, 1988); a Rockefeller grant for international workshops and conferences on Museums and Global Public Spheres (2006); and many more.

Karp also served as co-editor for the Indiana University Press series African Systems of Thought and the Smithsonian Institution Press series Studies in Ethnographic Inquiry. He served on the editorial boards of Museum Anthropology; African Philosophy; Les Classiques Africaines; Encyclopedia of Sub-Saharan Africa; Encyclopedia of African Religions and Philosophy; Cultural Anthropology; Anthropological LinguisticsAnthropology; and more.

The Ivan Karp/Corinne Kratz Fund was created after Karp’s death to continue the collaborative work he and Corinne Kratz began in 1999 with colleagues in South Africa. Donations to the Fund support student research and workshops in South Africa through the African Critical Inquiry Program, a partnership between Emory and the University of the Western Cape.

All downloadable papers are used here with permission. Please do not re-circulate them, but feel free to direct others to this website.