Philippe-Richard Marius
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Director of Financial Aid, College of Staten Island (CUNY)
Philippe-Richard Marius is a cultural anthropologist with research interests at the intersection of race, class privilege, postcolonial identity, and bourgeois modernity. He received a bachelor of fine arts in film from New York University and holds his Ph.D. from the Anthropology Program of the CUNY Graduate Center. His anthropological research, generally through an ethnohistorical approach, is informed by his training and practice in film. His fieldwork in the privileged classes of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. He has also conducted theoretical and empirical research in other Caribbean places, the United States, Canada, and Berlin, at Humboldt University. Marius regularly presents his work at annual meetings and conferences of the American Anthropological Association and the Caribbean Studies Association. He also presented findings from his ethnography of Haiti's elites at the 54th International Congress of Americanists (ICA) in Vienna (2012), and he has organized and chaired the symposium Identitarian Particularisms and Class Universality in the Reproduction of Privilege and Inequality in the Americas at the 56th ICA, at the University of Salamanca, Spain, July 15–20, 2018. He is currently completing the manuscript of his monograph Race and Class Privilege in Postcolonial Bourgeois Society: The Case of Haiti, which has been accepted for review by the University Press of Mississippi.
Marius is director of financial aid at the College of Staten Island, where he has worked since 1987. He is also an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, where he teaches and serves as thesis adviser in the interdisciplinary Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program (MALS). At the graduate level he has taught the MALS courses Roots of Modern Society, Modern Society, Modern Culture, and Interaction of Western and Non-Western Societies. At the undergraduate level, he has taught Understanding Our World, Cultural Anthropology, Urban Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, and Social Analysis. During his tenure at CSI, he wrote, produced, and co-directed the independent feature film A City Called Heaven, which was presented at the Pan African Film Festival of Los Angeles (1999), the African Diaspora International Film Festival (New York, 1999), and the Festival panafricain du cinema de Ouagadougou (FESPACO, 1999), and broadcast nationally on the cable television network BET-Starz (2001–02).
