Orin Starn

About Fellow

Orin Starn is an anthropologist and writer. He does research in Peru among other places, and is lead editor of the popular The Peru Reader as well as authoring his own book Nightwatch about Andean village organizing. Starn, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, also wrote the award-winning Ishi’s Brain about the life and legend of the last survivor of California’s Yahi tribe. His more recent book, The Passion of Tiger Woods, examines the superstar golfer’s place in American culture. He also offers an online course about sports and society taken by many thousands of students worldwide. 

Starn’s latest book, co-authored with historian Miguel La Serna, is The Shining Path: Love, Madness and Revolution in the Andes, about the story of a deadly guerrilla insurgency in Peru. His op-ed pieces have run in the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, and he has appeared on NPR, ESPN and many other radio and tv programs. A professor in the Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke University, Starn has won the university’s highest undergraduate teaching award. He is currently doing research about the role of Amazon.com in our society, including working in an Amazon fulfillment center. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and child.

Selected Publications

• Starn, Orin. “Inside Amazon’s Union-Busting Tactics.” Sapiens, 2024.
• Starn, Orin, and Miguel La Serna. The Shining Path: Love, Madness, and Revolution in the Andes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
• Starn, Orin, ed. Writing Culture and the Life of Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014.
• Starn, Orin. Ishi’s Brain: In Search of America’s Last “Wild” Indian. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.