Erica Kowsz is a cultural anthropologist, whose most recent research brings together semiotic approaches to social difference in contemporary liberal democracies, political and legal anthropology, and critical indigenous studies. From 2009 through 2014, she worked on issues related to cultural heritage and archaeological practice in North America. From 2015 through 2021, she undertook dissertation research on Indigenous experiences of social and political recognition in the United States and Norway. She completed her PhD in cultural anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022.

Her dissertation, Rules of Recognition: Indigenous Encounters with Society and the State, draws on fieldwork conducted in the US northeast and in Norway to examine the different form of government forms of recognition that Nipmuc and Sami people have experienced during the past several decades.  For decades, to gain access to the resources, rights, and legitimacy that state recognition confers, Indigenous political actors globally have navigate bureaucratic processes, from court proceedings to paperwork petitions. While the notion of Indigenous rights emerged at a global scale, such rights are specified in national jurisdictions. Indigenous people confront problems of their recognizability at all scales, both  in their everyday lives and as they engage with state processes determining who counts as Indigenous for the purposes of the state. Kowsz's dissertation centers on an analysis of the relationship between legal models of Indigeneity and the sociohistoric models of identity that guide readings of Indigenous people’s identities in everyday life. 

Kowsz has worked in university teaching, documentary film and video production, museum consultation, web content development, academic publishing, and qualitative research instruction and consulting with the Institute for Social Science Research. She has been a Fulbright fellow (Canada, 2011-2012), a Beinecke Scholar (2012-2015), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow (2014-2019), a two-time recipient of the Graduate Research Opportunities Worldwide (GROW) award through the US NSF and Norwegian Research Council (2017-2018, 2019), and a Mellon-Council for European Studies Dissertation Writing Fellow (2020-2021). Dr. Kowsz arrived at Wesleyan in 2022. As Associate Director for Fellowships at the Fries Center for Global Studies, she draws on her own track record with grants and fellowships and her many years working with student applicants at UMass Amherst to support Wesleyan students and alumni applying for nationally competitive awards. She also teaches the capstone course for Wesleyan’s Global Education Minor.