Susan Rasmussen is professor of anthropology in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. Her interests include anthropology of religion, medico-ritual healing and healing specialists, gender, and aging and the life course. She is also interested in rural and urban artisans, verbal art performance, ethnographic analysis, culture theory, and African humanities. She has published four books and many articles based on data from her long-term field research in Tuareg communities of northern Niger and Mali, and more briefly among Tuareg and other Berber (Amazigh) expatriates, immigrants, and travelers in France and the United States.