Deborah Pellow


Deborah Pellow is an American anthropologist at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, who is known for her work on urbanization and the anthropology of space and place in West Africa, particularly in Ghana.

Education and training

She received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and a PhD from Northwestern University in 1974, where she completed her dissertation on the topic, "Women in Accra: a study in options."

Academic career

She is a founding director of the Space and Place Initiative at the Global Affairs Institute at the Maxwell School. She also teaches in the school's Master of Social Science course. Her research is at the intersection of proxemics, ethnicity, micro-politics and conflict, feminist thought, women and gender. From 2009 to 2011, she was served as the president of the Society for Urban National and Transnational Anthropology. She has chaired the University Senate Library Committee and Chancellor Search Committee of Syracuse University. She also lived in northern Nigeria where she studied Hausa.

Selected awards and honors