Background
Harper was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Douglas Harper
Edit ProfileEducation
He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Macalester College in 1970 and a Doctor of Philosophy in sociology from Brandeis University. While doing research for his Doctor of Philosophy dissertation about railroad tramps, he rode freight trains for 20,000 miles (32,000 km) in the western United States. In 2014, he studied the sociology of public space in the Italian piazza and in the de-industrialized regions of the American Rust Belt.
Career
He is the holder of the Review Joseph A. Lauritis, C.S.Sp. Endowed Chair in Teaching with Technology at Duquesne University, a chair funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
After graduation, Harper wrote a book, Good Company, about railroad tramps.
Harper made extensive use of photo elicitation interviews in his 1987 book, Working Knowledge, a sociological treatment of the rural bricoleur in America. His 2001 publication, Changing Works, applied the same method to the historical reconstruction of cultural memory.
Harper has taught sociology at State University of New York Potsdam, the University of South Florida, and Duquesne University, and as a guest professor at the University of Amsterdam and University of Bologna. He edited the academic journal Visual Studies during its first thirteen years and wrote five works of visual ethnography published by the His Visual Sociology (Routledge 2012) is a comprehensive treatment of the topic.
He has had many photographic exhibitions in the United States and abroad.
Achievements
Politics
Harper later co-authored books on post-colonial culture in Hong Kong, Italian food culture, and the semiotics of Italian fascism, in which he researched images as method of cross-cultural communication.
