Introducing “How to Be Human”: WFU Anthropology Launches a New Lecture Series and Its Inaugural Speaker Just Won the Pulitzer Prize
Introducing “How to Be Human”: WFU Anthropology Launches a New Lecture Series and Its Inaugural Speaker Just Won the Pulitzer Prize
The Wake Forest Department of Anthropology recently launched How to Be Human, a new lecture series that brings leading anthropologists to campus each year. Our aim is straightforward: to showcase how anthropology’s commitment to human diversity and cross-disciplinary inquiry speaks directly to the challenges we face today.
How to Be Human will bring distinguished visiting scholars to campus each academic year for three years, with each visit including a public lecture, classroom visits, and informal gatherings with students and faculty.
Our First Event, with a Now-Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author
On Wednesday, April 1, we welcomed Dr. Brian Goldstone as the inaugural speaker of the series in Carswell Auditorium. Goldstone, a journalist with a Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke University, has had his work published in The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and The New Republic. At this event, he first spoke about his award-winning book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, and then joined local expert Phyllis Caldwell-George for a candid on-stage conversation moderated by Dr. Sherri Lawson Clark, with lively Q&A from the audience at the end. Bookmarks facilitated signed book sales and giveaways on site.
The event was co-sponsored by the Departments of Journalism and American Ethnic Studies, the Humanities Institute (via the National Endowment for the Humanities), and the Program for Leadership and Character.
The Working Homeless and why they matter
There Is No Place for Us follows five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. The central subject is what Goldstone calls “the working homeless” — people with full-time jobs who cannot keep a roof over their heads, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. Because these families don’t show up in official homelessness statistics, the crisis is much larger than most people realize.
The book follows parents and their kids as they go to sleep in cars or in squalid extended-stay hotel rooms and head out to their jobs and schools the next morning. Built on years of ethnographic fieldwork, court records, video footage, and diary entries, it is investigated with depth, yet it reads with the narrative drive of literary nonfiction. The New York Times named it one of the ten best books of 2025 and called it “an exceptional feat of reporting.”
Breaking News: A Pulitzer Prize
There Is No Place for Us has just been awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction — announced May 4, 2026. Wake Forest Anthropology is proud to say that our How to Be Human series brought this now-Pulitzer Prize-winning author to our campus just weeks ago, and glad that students, faculty, and community members had the chance to hear him speak and ask him questions directly.
Why This Series, Why Anthropology, Why Now
Most students arrive at Wake Forest with limited exposure to anthropology as a discipline. Even many faculty across campus don’t always realize how much it has to offer, and how it grapples with fundamental and contemporary questions. But as Thurka Sangaramoorthy, chair of the Anthropology Department at American University, recently argued in the Washington Post, the hardest problems facing institutions and governments right now are not technical ones — they are human ones. Why do health interventions that succeed in clinical trials fail in communities? Why do AI systems trained on historical data reproduce and amplify existing inequities? These are anthropological questions, and they require skills that anthropology trains students to develop: moving between close attention to individual lives and systemic analysis of the structures that shape them; asking whose voices are absent from any account of reality; holding complexity in mind without flattening it into a data point.
Anthropology’s methods and commitments — ethnography, attention to structural inequality, cross-cultural perspective, community-embedded research — are relevant to fields across this campus. The How to Be Human series doesn’t just describe what anthropology does, but demonstrates how it can also help make sense of a complicated world.
Stay tuned for announcements about our fall speaker. We hope you’ll join us.