Joey Russo is a cultural anthropologist whose work explores conspiracy, security, and the affective life of suspicion. He is the author of Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas (Duke University Press, 2023), which received the Ruth Benedict Prize Honorable Mention and the Edie Turner Prize for First Book in Ethnographic Writing. His recent research examines the anthropology of conspiracy theory and the phenomenology of belief in late modernity. He has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University (2020-2025) and SUNY Purchase (2018-2025), as well as an adjunct lecturer at numerous universities. He is currently an independent ethnographer and scholar; performing fieldwork throughout the rural American South.