Cari Costanzo (Ph.D. Stanford Class of 2005) is an Academic Advising Director in the office of Undergraduate Advising and Research (UAR) at Stanford, where she serves as an academic advisor for undergraduates. Her advising conversations with students include academic planning, exploring interests, identifying goals, choosing majors, assessing academic progress, connecting with faculty, enhancing study habits and other academic skills, finding opportunities for research and service, applying for grants and fellowships, navigating university requirements and policies, and other aspects of students' academic endeavors.

Cari is also a cultural anthropologist. Her teaching and research examine historical memory; discourses of identity; race, class, and gender; social networks; transnationalism; and contemporary urbanism. She has conducted fieldwork in Hawaii and India. Employing both historical and ethnographic research methods, Cari’s dissertation looked at the effects of American “colonialism” on contemporary politics in Hawaii. Cari's post-doctoral research examines emerging global workspaces--specifically call centers in India--as sites for “virtual journeys” into new cultural realms. Cari explores how call center employees in India inhabit both the transnational labor networks where they work, and the contemporary urban spaces where they live, resulting in the complex and sometimes contradictory intersection of gender and culture.

Cari is currently conducting an ethnographic study of life in a freshman dormitory, looking at how technology is used to mediate not only social networks, but also narratives of success and failure.

Cari is also co-teaching the Thinking Matters course “Reading the Body,” which explores the way culture informs and distorts how we discern, accept, reject, and analyze our bodies. The course engages literary, medical, ethical, and ethnographic texts to ask how representations of the body affect the way we experience illness, embody gender and racial identities, and understand our rights (or lack of rights) to control our own bodies.