Dr. Alexandra Golla, FRAI, FRSB, FLS, has taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY) since 2021. In 2024, she received the John Jay Outstanding Mentorship Award from the Department of Sociology. She is a curriculum developer for the John Jay Landmark U.S. Supreme Court Cases Program and a contributor to the John Jay textbook Social Justice Landmark Cases. She previously taught at New York University and Fordham.
Golla spent four years as a textbook reviewer and ancillary editor at W. W. Norton and has written for American Ethnologist, Ethnography in Context, and Anthropology of Work Review. She has peer-reviewed for Ethnography and Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and has presented papers at several Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association.
Her current research interests include transnational crime, victimology, multispecies ethnography, and the ethnography of genetics.
Golla was born in Brazil and raised in London and Connecticut. She received a B.A. in anthropology from Cornell, a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from UCLA, and a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the UCLA School of Medicine. She has received two National Research Service Awards from the NIH and is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Society of Biology, and the Linnean Society.
FIELDNOTES:
Her last name, Golla, rhymes with ‘cola.’
Her father was a software developer, and her mother was a journalist for Fortune magazine and later Director of Communications at the Brearley School.
She spoke French at home growing up and minored in French at university.
Her godparents were Priscilla and Rainer Esslen. Rainer wrote the bestselling The Complete Book of International Investing.
Ambassador Satya Nandan was a family friend who gave her a copy of The Family of Man by Edward Steichen, leading to her interest in ethnography.
As an undergraduate, she completed archaeological fieldwork and excavation at La Piana, a Late Etruscan settlement near Siena, Italy.
Spent two terms at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford to study with Prof. Elizabeth Edwards FBA, Photography Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
From 2006 to 2008, she was Teaching Assistant to Jared Diamond, professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
Her UCLA doctoral committee included Sherry Ortner and Mariko Tamanoi. As part of her research, she participated as an extra in Dexter, Entourage, Ugly Betty, and Cold Case. Her dissertation was titled Risky Business: Aspiring Hollywood Actors and the Selling of the Self.
She is on the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy.
Her other interests include travel, running, and working on her debut novel.