Helen A. Regis
Richard J. Russell Louisiana Studies Professor
Education
Ph.D. Tulane University, 1997
Selected Publications
2024 Bayou Harvest: Subsistence Practices in Coastal Louisiana. By Helen A. Regis and Shana Walton. University Press of Mississippi.
2023“Laugh Cry Eat Drink Dance: Tracing Belonging through Cartographies of Joy.” (with Shana Walton) Anthropology & Humanism 48(2): 1-19.
2023 “Doing Oral History as Public Anthropology.” Southern Anthropologist 38 (Fall): 74-99.
2021. Ships on the Wall: Retracing African Trade Routes from Marseille, France. Special
issue on Decolonizing Ways of Knowing, edited by Antoinette Jackson and Rachel Breunlin.
Genealogy 5: 1-36
https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy5020027
2013 “Producing Africa at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.” African Arts 46(2): 70-85.
2009 Creativity and Activism in the Seventh Ward: Toward a Critical Collaborative Ethnography. (with Rachel Breunlin) Collaborative Anthropologies 2 (2009): 115-146.
2008 “Producing the Folk at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.” (with Shana Walton) Journal of American Folklore 121(482): 400-440
2006 “Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map: Race, Place, and Transformation in Desire, New Orleans.” (by Rachel Breunlin and Helen Regis) American Anthropologist 108(4):745-765.
2004 Charitable Choices: Religion, Race, and Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era (with John Bartkowski), NYU,
Research and Teaching Interests
I’ve been involved in urban, public, collaborative, and applied anthropology for over two decades, working in the US, Europe, and West Africa, as a bicultural anthropologist at LSU and as Board President of the Neighborhood Story Project, an organization that creates collaborative exhibits, ethnographies, and events in New Orleans. I have served on the boards of the CubaNOLA Arts Collective, the Louisiana Folklore Society, and the House of Dance & Feathers. After the 2010 oil disaster, I led an effort to study the role of subsistence fishing, hunting, and gardening in Coastal Louisiana leading to a forthcoming book, Bayou Harvest (with Shana Walton). I teach courses ranging from first-year intros to graduate seminars on comics and graphic narrative; feminist, decolonial, and multispecies ethnography; and the history of anthropology.
Key Words
Cultural Anthropology; Public & Applied Anthropology
Public Space, Social Movements, Cultural Heritage Tourism,
Collaborative Ethnography; Oral History & Life Narrative
Coastal Cities; Africa & African Diaspora; Whydah, Marseille, New Orleans