Paige West

Paige West joined the faculty at Barnard College and Columbia University in 2001, the year after earning her PhD in cultural and environmental anthropology at Rutgers University. She holds the Claire Tow Professorship in Anthropology. 

West has worked in Papua New Guinea since 1997 and has conducted over 100 months of field-based research in the country. Her scholarship has focused on the linkages between conservation and development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is understood by Indigenous peoples and natural scientists, the production of biodiversity-based commodities, race and racism in conservation, Indigenous alternatives to external conservation, and climate change. Since 2007, all of her work in Papua New Guinea has been conducted in full collaboration with scholars and activists from Papua New Guinea. West is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received scholarships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Museum of Natural History. 

Paige West serves as an Advisory Committee Member.