Melissa Fisher is a cultural anthropologist who writes on finance, feminism, and the workplace. Her first book, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press, 2006), a co-edited volume, brought together ethnographies exploring how cultural practices and social relations were altered by radical economic and technological innovations during the turn of the new millennium. Her second book, Wall Street Women (Duke University Press, 2012), tracks how the first generation of Wall Street women simultaneously built professional careers in finance while constructing market feminisms (1956-2010). She is working on a third book about gender, sexuality, diversity, and inclusion in finance and film. Based on fieldwork in the United States and Europe, it focuses on how social movements (such as Me Too) shape individual careers as well as organizational life and policymaking.
Fisher has given numerous key notes and conference talks nationally and internationally. Her book on Wall Street women received over twenty-five reviews in academic journals. Her research has been profiled by The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, The Guardian, The Times of India, CNBC, NPR and the BBC. She has written for publications such as Bloomberg and Bill Moyer’s Group Think. She has appeared on television and was featured in the Emmy nominated 2014 PBS documentary Makers: Women in Business.She also played an advisory role in the first female financial thriller film: Equity, a Sony Classic Pictures release (2016).
Fisher was most recently the Laurits Andersen Professor with Special Responsibilities in Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She has also been a faculty member in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University. She is currently a member of the Women Creating Change Leadership Council at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. As a US Delegate to the Women’s 20 in Argentina (2018) and Japan (2019), she advises on issues such as gender and financial inclusion. Fisher earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology at Columbia University and her B.A. in English at Barnard College.