John Collins received his Ph.D. in Ethnology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor after earning a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Yale College. He joined Queens College in 2003 and spent the 2004-2005 academic year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center. This supported the final writing stages of his first book, The Revolt of the Saints: Memory and Redemption in the Twilight of Brazilian ‘Racial Democracy,’ under contract at Duke University Press. The Revolt of the Saints is a historical ethnography of the making of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
            Professor Collins is currently working on Under English Eye, a new monograph that examines slavery, freedom, state-sponsored philanthropy, and liberalism in the mid 19th C. South Atlantic. In fall/winter 2006 he will begin a new ethnographic project on the cultural politics of class as related to white tail deer hunting in modern New Jersey. Collins is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and reviews that address questions related to racial politics, nationalism, urbanism, critical theory, gender, and the intersections of anthropology and history. His research has been funded by Fulbright, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Brazilian PIBIC Program, the University of Michigan Institute of Research on Women and Gender, and PSC-CUNY. He lives in Astoria, Queens, with his wife Ana and son Gabriel and is active in educational and landmarks/preservations issues in New York City.