Serving through 2026
Claudia Gastrow is assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. Gastrow is focused on questions of urbanism, with a particular focus on Africa. Her work examines urban planning, self-built housing, informality, urban governance, architecture, and practices of urban inclusion and exclusion. She is currently particularly interested in processes of risk evaluation, financialization, real estate investment and enclaving practices in African cities. Gastrow has been a senior lecturer at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa from 2016 to 2023. She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Witwatersrand. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and an M.A. in African Studies from the University of Basel. She also holds a B.A. in History and a B.Soc.Sci. in History and Politics from the University of Cape Town. Her manuscript titled The Aesthetics of Belonging: Indigenous urbanism and city-building in oil-boom Luanda is currently under contract with University of North Carolina Press.