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Meet the Director

Rudolf Gaudio

Rudi Gaudio Professor Gaudio has been a member of the Purchase College faculty since 2001, teaching and supervising senior projects in Anthropology, Media Studies, Gender Studies, and Global Black Studies. As Director of the School of Natural and Social Sciences, he is eager to work with students of all ages and backgrounds who want to discover how and why our world is at it is and what we can do about it.

Rudolf Gaudio is a cultural anthropologist with degrees in linguistics and international affairs. He has studied several languages, including Hausa, Swahili, Russian, and Italian. He does research and writes about city life, language, and social diversity in two countries: Nigeria and the USA. His first book, Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City, is an ethnography of ‘yan daudu, men who are said to talk and “like women” in the Muslim, Hausa-speaking region of northern Nigeria. His second book project, New Black City: Design and Desire for a Modern African Capital, is an anthropological study of Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, which was built from scratch in the 1980s and is one of the fastest-growing cities in Africa today. Research for that project was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. Gaudio has also done research in the USA on such topics as: the differences between straight and gay men’s speech patterns; and the way many Americans say “go for coffee” when they really mean “pay to sit together and talk.”

  • Ph.D. in Linguistics, Stanford University
  • M.A. in International Affairs, Columbia University
  • B.A. in Russian Studies, Yale University