Andrew Carruthers

Andrew M. Carruthers is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses in linguistic anthropology, semiotics, and Southeast Asian Studies, in addition to topical classes on migration and globalization. Trained in the ethnography of Island Southeast Asia, he studies Malay-speaking migrants’ everyday evaluative practices to better understand how they jointly navigate the interpersonal and infrastructural realities of life across the world’s largest and most populous archipelago.

He was the 2022-2023 U.S. Senior Fulbright Scholar to Malaysia, based at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Before arriving at Penn, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Max Weber Foundation Research Group on “Borders, Mobility, and New Infrastructures” at the National University of Singapore, and a Visiting Fellow in the Indonesian and Malaysian Studies Programmes at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.