Professor and Chair of Anthropology

Jessaca Leinaweaver joined Brown University and the PSTC in the fall of 2008. She conducts research in cultural anthropology and anthropological demography within Peru and the Peruvian diaspora.

She is the winner of the Margaret Mead Award for her first book, The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru (Duke, 2008), about informal child fostering and child migration in the urban Andes. Her second book, Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain (Duke, 2013), identifies unexpected similarities between international migration and adoption, and analyzes the consequences for transracial adoptees of relocating to a diverse society with sizable immigrant populations.

Leinaweaver's field research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, Fulbright IIE, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Leinaweaver's current research, funded by NSF, the Ruth Landes Grant, and the Howard Foundation, examines aging, dependency, and demographic thinking in Peru. She is also completing a collaborative project on child agency and systems of caregiving in rural Peru with Dr. Jeanine Anderson.

Selected Publications

Leinaweaver, Jessaca. Geographies of generation: age restrictions in international adoption. Social & Cultural Geography. 2015; 1-14.

Leinaweaver, Jessaca. The Quiet Migration Redux: International Adoption, Race, and Difference. human organization. 2014; 73(1): 62-71.

Leinaweaver, Jessaca. Kinship Paths to and from the New Europe: A Unified Analysis of Peruvian Adoption and Migration. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology. 2011; 16(2): 380-400.

Leinaweaver, Jessaca. Outsourcing care: how Peruvian migrants meet transnational family obligations. Latin American Perspectives. 2010; 37(5): 67-87.

Scholarly Interests

Adoption, Aging, Anthropological demography, Caregiving, Childhood, Family, Gender, Migration, Reproduction

Affiliated Departments

Department of Anthropology