Meet a Colleague: Sascha Goluboff Sascha Goluboff is a professor of cultural anthropology and serves as director for both the Community-Based Learning program and the Shepherd Higher Education Consortium on Poverty.

W&L News Office
January 18, 2024

Q. How long have you worked at W&L?
I have been working at W&L since 1999.

Q. What courses are you teaching this term?
POV/SOAN 253: Narrating Our Stories: Culture, Society, and Identity. In this course, W&L students and incarcerated students at Augusta Correctional Center learn side by side. The class utilizes methodologies I learned at the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program at Temple University.

Q. What is your favorite course to teach, and why? 
I love teaching 253 because the prison setting (with its no digital technology protocols) provides the space for students to be completely present in the classroom experience. The connections that inside and outside students make change their perspectives on their own identities and society. It provides inside students with the chance to be seen as equals, thus reaffirming their humanity.

Q. What is the most satisfying aspect of teaching?
I love those “aha” moments when students see how a theory explains/illuminates their own life circumstances, connecting their personal experiences to larger social processes. In other words, they realize that they are not alone.

Q. What do you like most about working at W&L?
I love the friendliness and sense of community – I don’t need to show my ID to check out a library book!

Q. What’s your favorite thing to do when you’re not working?
Peloton!

Q. Where did you grow up?
In the suburbs outside of Philadelphia.

Q. When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be a professor. Both my parents worked in higher education.

Q. Who inspired you to teach? What about them inspired you?
My mom inspired me to teach. She always had the welfare of the students in mind but also had strict standards when it came to their meeting the learning goals. She believed that they could better themselves – expand their minds and hone their skills – through education.

Q. What is the most adventurous thing that you have ever done?
I did my post-dissertation fieldwork in a village in Northern Azerbaijan.

Q. What book are you reading now?
Colston Whitehead’s “Crook Manifesto.”

Q. What music are you listening to these days?
My youngest son just joined the jazz band at Lylburn Downing Middle School, so we listen to jazz in the car.

Q. If you could have coffee with one person, who would it be and why?
I am obsessed with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” right now, so I would have to say RuPaul Charles. I’d want to know more about how he fosters the art of drag worldwide in difficult times.

Q. If you could live anywhere, where would you build your dream home?
I would live by the ocean.

Q. What is your favorite film (movie) of all time?
“Bladerunner” (the original released in 1982).

Q. If they made a movie about your life, who would play you?
Gal Godot (I should be so lucky!).

Q. What is your desert island food?
Greek yogurt.

Q. Tell us something most people don’t know about you.
I have a soft spot for poodles.

Q. What is your secret talent?
I have a wicked sense of humor.