Skip to main content
Hunter College
  • Information for
    • Students
    • Alumni & Friends
    • Faculty
    • Staff
    • Community
  • QUICK LINKS
  • DIRECTORY
  • APPLY
  • GIVE
  • RENT
Hunter College The School of Arts & Sciences
Hunter College The School of Arts & Sciences
The School
  • Office of the Dean
  • Departments & Programs
  • Undergraduate Academics
  • Graduate Academics
  • Awards & Scholarships
  • Resources for Students
  • Resources for Faculty & Staff
  • Faculty Awards & Achievements
  • News & Events
  • Contact Us
Departments & Programs (A-H)
  • Africana, Puerto Rican & Latino Studies
  • Anthropology
  • Art & Art History
  • Asian American Studies
  • Biological Sciences
  • Chemistry
  • Classical & Oriental Studies
  • Computer Science
  • Creative Writing
  • Dance
  • Economics/Accounting
  • English
  • Film & Media Studies
  • Geography & Environmental Science
  • German
  • History
  • Human Biology
  • Human Rights
Departments & Programs (I-Z)
  • Jewish Studies
  • Latin American & Caribbean Studies
  • Macaulay Honors College
  • Mathematics & Statistics
  • Medical Laboratory Sciences
  • Music
  • Philosophy
  • Physics & Astronomy
  • Political Science
  • Psychology
  • Public Policy
  • Religion
  • Romance Languages
  • Sociology
  • Theatre
  • Thomas Hunter Honors Program
  • Translation & Interpreting
  • Urban Policy and Planning
  • Women & Gender Studies
  • Admissions
  • Advising
  • Libraries
  • Undergraduate Catalog
  • Graduate Catalog
 
Hunter College Home
Hunter College Schools
  • School of Arts & Sciences
  • School of Education
  • School of Health Professions
  • Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing
  • Silberman School of Social Work
More Schools
  • Hunter College Campus Schools
  • Hunter College Continuing Education
  • Libraries
  • Undergraduate Catalog
  • Graduate Catalog
  • Students
  • Alumni & Friends
  • Faculty
  • Staff
  • Community
  • Admissions
  • Advising
  • APPLY
  • GIVE
  • RENT
  • QUICK LINKS
  • DIRECTORY
School of Arts and Sciences /
Anthropology
  • About
  • Undergraduate
  • Graduate
    • Research and Thesis Guidelines
  • Courses
  • Faculty and Staff
  • Advising
  • Research
    • Human Ecodynamics Research Center
    • Nutritional Ecology Lab
    • Primate Evolution Lab
    • Primate Molecular Evolution Lab
    • NYCEP
    • NABO
    • Peasants' Rights Project
    • NABO Field School
    • WASP Field School
  • News
  • Contact
Leo Coleman

Leo Coleman

Associate Professor

Leo Coleman is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology. He teaches both undergraduate and MA-level seminars on the cultures of science and technology, energy-intensive forms of life, and law and ethnographic comparison.

See Contact Details

Profile

Dr. Leo Coleman is an associate professor of the Department of Anthropology. He teaches both undergraduate and MA-level seminars on the cultures of science and technology, energy-intensive forms of life, and law and ethnographic comparison.

Dr. Coleman is a political and legal anthropologist, a subfield of cultural anthropology that focuses on the making and unmaking of social divisions, the distribution of power, and the plural scales of value that guide decisions. He is currently pursuing two book projects: a comparative historical anthropology of legalism and constitutionalism as ethical orientations to politics, with a special ethnographic focus on Scotland and India, and a book about the relation between ideas of energy and evaluation in social thought, or the force of judgment. His earlier book, A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi (Cornell University Press, 2017), is a historical and ethnographic study of electrification in India's capital city; it explores how technological installations and the meanings they were granted helped organize and transform urban political life across Delhi's twentieth-century history. Dr. Coleman has published a wide array of articles and essays about critical infrastructure studies in Asia, power and knowledge in the British Empire, the corporation and American constitutional thought, and urban solitude. He has also edited a collection of ethnographic writing about cross-cultural dining and sharing food, titled Food: Ethnographic Encounters (Berg/Bloomsbury, 2011). Finally, he maintains an active interest in the disciplinary history of anthropology, as a problematic project of ethical understanding across societies that in various ways influenced twentieth-century international politics, from empire to decolonization to neoliberal development, and occasionally teaches the department's core course in the History of Anthropological Theory.

Educational Background

  • Princeton University (PhD)
  • University of St. Andrews (MA)

Selected Publications

Single-Authored Book

  • 2017. A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Edited Books/Special Issues

  • Editor, with Jessamyn R. Abel. "Infrastructures and Global Political Aesthetics." Special issue of Verge: Studies in Global Asias 6(2).
  • Editor. 2011. Food: Ethnographic Encounters. Oxford: Berg Press.

Selected Essays, Articles and Reviews

  • Coleman, Leo. 2023. “Impossible Realities and Intellectual Property: Spectres of Value in Amie Siegel’s Provenance.” Pólemos: Journal of Law, Literature, and Culture 17(2): 151-171.  https://doi.org/10.1515/pol-2023-2020.
  • Coleman, Leo. 2021. “Malinowski and Mauss Exchanging Knowledge in Interwar Europe: Lessons in Internationalism.” Durkheimian Studies/Études Durkheimiennes 25(1): 78-106.
  • Coleman, Leo. 2019. "Widened Reason and Deepened Optimism: Electricity and Morality in Durkheim’s Anthropology and Our Own." Electrifying Anthropology: Exploring Electrical Practices and Infrastructures, Simone Abram, Britt Ross Winthereik and Thomas Yarrow, eds., pp. 43-63. New York: Bloomsbury.
  • Coleman, Leo. 2018. "Building Scotland, Building Solidarity: A Scottish Architect’s Knowledge of Nation." Comparative Studies in Society and History 60(4): 873-906.
  • Coleman, Leo. 2017. "Functionalists Write II: Weird Empathy in Malinowski's Trobriand Ethnographies." Anthropological Quarterly 90(4): 973-1002.
  • Coleman, Leo. 2017. "Material as Opposed to What? Three Recent Ethnographies of Welfare, Biological Labor, and Human Dignity." Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology.
  • Coleman, Leo. 2016. "Why to Read Winnicott After the US Election, and How." Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology.

Contact Details

Leo Coleman

Anthropology
68th Street North 709B
(212) 396-6780
lc1049@hunter.cuny.edu

HUNTER

Hunter College
695 Park Ave NY, NY 10065
(212) 772-4000

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Flickr
  • ABOUT
  • ACADEMICS
  • ADMISSIONS
  • EVENTS
  • NEWS
Hunter College Schools
  • School of Arts & Sciences
  • School of Education
  • School of Health Professions
  • Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing
  • Silberman School of Social Work
  • School of Arts & Sciences
  • School of Education
  • School of Health Professions
  • Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing
  • Silberman School of Social Work
Our Other Schools
  • Hunter College Campus Schools
  • Hunter College Continuing Education
  • Hunter College Campus Schools
  • Hunter College Continuing Education
Hunter College Libraries
More Info
  • Bookstore
  • Contact Us & Feedback
  • Jobs
  • Public Safety
  • Roosevelt House
  • Student Housing
  • Space Rentals
  • Bookstore
  • Contact Us & Feedback
  • Jobs
  • Public Safety
  • Roosevelt House
  • Student Housing
  • Space Rentals
Public Information
  • Annual Security & Fire Safety Report
  • Consumer Information
  • CUNY Tobacco Policy
  • Enough is Enough
  • Focus on Campus
  • Annual Security & Fire Safety Report
  • Consumer Information
  • CUNY Tobacco Policy
  • Enough is Enough
  • Focus on Campus
CUNY
  • © 2025 Hunter College
  • Accessibility
  • Privacy
  • Terms