Kathleen M. Adams is a cultural anthropologist, Professorial Research Associate at SOAS, University of London,[1] and Professor Emerita at Loyola University Chicago.[2] Known for her research on cultural transformations in island Southeast Asia, (especially Toraja society in Indonesia), she has made contributions to critical tourism studies, heritage studies, Indonesian art, and museum studies. Her award-winning books include Art as Politics: Re-crafting Identities, Tourism and Power in Tana Toraja, Indonesia and The Ethnography of Tourism: Edward Bruner and Beyond (coedited with N. Leite and Q. Casteneda) among others.
Adams received her B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Washington. She held the Mouat Family Endowed Chair for Junior Faculty [3] at Beloit College and was a professor of Cultural Anthropology and Asian Studies at Loyola University Chicago (1993-2020). She was also an Adjunct Curator at the Field Museum of Natural History.
Adams has held fellowships and visiting appointments at various universities, including a Fulbright Specialist Award at Gadjah Mada University (2024) in Indonesia, a Visiting Fellowship at The Center for Tourism Research at Wakayama University (2020-2023) and Visiting Professorships at Ateneo de Manila University (2016), Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (2016), and Loyola University Chicago's John Felice Rome Center (2008-2009). [4] She was also a Isaac Manasseh Meyer Senior Fellow at the National University of Singapore's Centre for Advanced Study (1999),and taught on several University of Virginia Semester at Sea voyages.[5]
In addition to research grants from the Fulbright,[6] the American Philosophical Society, the Henry R. Luce Foundation, Adams has received several book prizes, Loyola University's Sujack Master Researcher Award (2016, 2020),[7] Loyola University Chicago's 2007 Sujack Award for Teaching Excellence, and recognition by Princeton Review as one of the "300 best professors" in the US and Canada in 2012.[8] In 2024 she was inducted into Redwood High School's Avenue of Giants.[9]