Claudio Lomnitz is William H. Ransford Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, and editor of Public Culture. Prior to joining Columbia University, Lomnitz was Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at the New School of Social Research and, before that, taught at the University of Chicago and New York University.

Lomnitz received his PhD from Stanford in 1987. His first book, Evolución de una sociedad rural (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982) was a study of politics and cultural change in Tepoztlán, Mexico. After that, Lomnitz developed an interest in conceptualizing the nation-state as a kind of cultural region, a theme that culminated in Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in Mexican National Space (University of California Press, 1992). In that work, Lomnitz also concentrated on the social work of intellectuals, a theme that he developed in various works on the history of public culture in Mexico, including Modernidad Indiana (Mexico City, 1999) and Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico: An Anthropology of Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Most recently, Lomnitz published Death and the Idea of Mexico (Zone Books, 2005), a political and cultural history of death in Mexico from the 16th to the 21st centuries.

His current work focuses on the historical anthropology of crisis.