Eléonore Rimbault is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the Society of Fellows for the Liberal Arts and a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago.

Eléonore is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research attends to the ethical questions raised by the categorization and marginalization of individuals and social groups, both human and nonhuman, and the aesthetic regimes through which social differentiation materializes in South Asia. Her current book project, The Thrill of Disappearance: Labor, Publicity, and Recollection in India’s Circus Industry, is a visual ethnography of the circus profession in India, which examines the enduring idea that the circus is disappearing in postcolonial India, especially as this idea materializes in Kerala. It is based on her doctoral dissertation, which received the 2023 Daniel F. Nugent Prize for best dissertation in historical anthropology at the University of Chicago. Her research more broadly is interested in mobilizing the methods of historical and linguistic anthropology to investigate the connections between publicity and inequity, representation, intervention and stigma, and the actualization of ethical regimes in everyday life in South Asia.

Eléonore’s writing has been featured in Public Culture, Asian Ethnology, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Anthropology Now, and HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. She also contributes to the circulation of research and theory in the social sciences through translation work. This year, she completed a translation of B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste into French, which will be published in 2025 by the Indian publisher Other Books.