My animating questions center on why, how, and with what consequences people come to feel that their well-being is or is not bound up with that of others.  My research investigates these issues in medical, religious, and political dimensions. 

I have conducted long-term fieldwork in Botswana. In my book Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS, I describe how members of an Apostolic healing church in the capital city, Gaborone, made efforts to sustain relationships of care and love in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

My current work, focusing on Pentecostal churches in Buffalo, New York, explores how believers understand knowledge derived from God as essential to their well-being. In my book Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality, I compare how members of one majority white and two African American Pentecostal churches in Buffalo reflect in divergent ways on God's designs and the moral perils from which they hope to be redeemed.

I serve as director of the Medical Anthropology lab in the Department of Anthropology at the University at Buffalo.

• PhD, Johns Hopkins University
  
• MA, Johns Hopkins University
  
• MA, Yale University
  
• BA, Yale University

Undergraduate Courses

• APY 106 | Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
  
• APY 199 | UB Seminar: Why Have Wealth?
  
• APY 275 | Culture, Health and Illness
  
• APY 369 | Peoples & Cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa
  
• APY 393 | Anthropology of Religion
• APY 477 | Disability and Culture

Graduate Courses

• APY 512 | Kinship and Social Structure
  
• APY 575 | Special Topics: Gender and the Politics of Health in Africa
  
• APY 578 | Ethnomedicine
  
• APY 609 | Disability and Culture
  
• APY 654 | Graduate Survey of Social Theory II (Contemporary)

Books

• 2022  Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated US City: Designs for Vitality, by Frederick Klaits with LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
• 2017 The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian Endeavors, edited by Frederick Klaits. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  
• 2010 Death in a Church of Life: Moral Passion during Botswana’s Time of AIDS. Berkeley: University of California Press.

• 2017  "Catch the Word": Creativity, Contract, and Prophetic Confirmation in African American Pentecostalism. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (3): 237-260.
• 2017 Asking in Time. In The Request and the Gift in Religious and Humanitarian Endeavors, edited by Frederick Klaits, pp.1-24. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2017  “We All Ask Together”: Intercession and Composition as Models for Spiritual Kinship.” In New Directions in Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions, edited by Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik, and Rose Wellman, pp. 131-149. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2016 Insult and Insecurity: Discernment, Trust, and the Uncanny in Two U.S. Pentecostal Communities. Anthropological Quarterly 89(4):1143-1173.
• 2016 Grasping, Trust, and Truth-on-Balance. Comment on Werbner, Richard. 2015. Divination’s Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6(3):413-418.
• 2015 Valuing Black Lives: Pentecostalism, Charismatic Gifts, and Human Economies in a U.S. Inner City. Co-authored with Shenita A. McLean. American Ethnologist 42(4):610-623.
• 2012 Christianity in Southern Africa: The Aesthetics of Well-Being. In Introducing World Christianity, Charles Farhadian, ed. London: Blackwell.
• 2011 Introduction: Self, Other and God in African Christianities. Journal of Religion in Africa 41(2):143-153.
• 2011 Asking as Giving: Apostolic Prayers and the Aesthetics of Well-Being in Botswana. Journal of Religion in Africa 41(2):206-226.
• 2009 Faith and the Intersubjectivity of Care in Botswana. Africa Today 56(1):3-20.
• 2005 Review Essay: Postcolonial Civility. Journal of Southern African Studies 31(3):649-662.
• 2005 The Widow in Blue: Blood and the Morality of Remembering during Botswana’s Time of AIDS. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 75(1):46-62.
• 2002 Funerals and the Public Space of Sentiment in Botswana. Co-authored with Deborah Durham. Journal of Southern African Studies 28(4):773-791.
• 1998 Making a Good Death: AIDS and Social Belonging in an Independent Church in Gaborone. Botswana Notes and Records 30:101-119.