Jeffrey Cole

Jeffrey Cole’s research and teaching interests include migration, race and ethnicity, labor markets, and food and agriculture in Europe as well as the US. Committed to fostering an engaging pedagogy, he has published as well on the learning–and teaching–experience of a course-related research project on beginning farmers in New London County.

A faculty member of the Food Pathway, Cole teaches the thematic inquiry gateway course and will serve as coordinator starting in the spring of 2025. He is a fellow of the Goodwin-Niering Center for the Environment (GNCE) and has supervised many individual studies and honors theses conducted by scholars in the GNCE, the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA), and the Department of Anthropology.

Cole is currently exploring the intersection of lifestyle migration and the revitalization efforts in small towns western Sicily, Italy. For the past three decades, he has examined the patterns and changes associated with population movement on the island.

His first book, A New Racism in Europe: A Sicilian Ethnography (1997), examines everyday reactions to immigrants on the part of rich and poor Italians in the city of Palermo, Sicily; it also attempts to explain regional variation within Italy of political mobilization both in support of and against newcomers. His second book, Dirty Work: Immigrants in Domestic Service, Agriculture, and Prostitution in Sicily (2007), with Sally Booth, examines the contours and consequences of immigrant employment in rural and urban Sicily. Together with Pietro Saitta of the University of Messina, Italy, Cole later co-edited two special issues of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies devoted to the second generation. He also revisited the processes of ethnic and national identity as editor of Ethnic Groups of Europe (2011), a one-volume encyclopedia.

Professor Cole is the recipient of grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, Wenner-Gren, the Fulbright program, and the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation. He served as president (2012-14) of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association.

In addition to participating in a variety of committees and centers, Cole has served as Chair of Anthropology, Associate Dean of the Faculty, and Dean of the Faculty. He is currently the faculty mentor of New York Posse 5.

Courses Taught:

• Foundations of Cultural and Social Anthropology
• History of Anthropological Theory
• Immigration to the US (first-year seminar)
• Food Pathway Thematic Inquiry
• Power, Food, and People in Sicily
• Anthropology Everywhere
• Sustainable Food Systems
• Worlds of Food
• Cultivating Change
• Food and Migration