Anthropology Faculty

BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD candidate, University of Chicago. Special interests in the cultural construction of intersubjectivity, personhood, and agency; transborder and transnational experience; politics of indigeneity; ethnicity and race; cross-cultural modes of illness and healing; ethnographic practice; Mexico and Latin America. Ethnographic fieldwork in Yucatán, Mexico, and with Maya migrants in California. Recipient of grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, and the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies. SLC, 2009–

BA, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. MA, PhD, University of California-Los Angeles. Special interests in the cultural construction of experience, subjectivity and inter-subjectivity, death and mourning, and the political economy of illness and healing; ethnographic fieldwork in the Nepal Himalayas, with the residents of a homeless shelter in Boston, and among competitive chess players; author of Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas; Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood Among the Homeless; Sensory Biographies: Lives and Deaths Among Nepal’s Yolmo Buddhists; and Counter-play: an Anthropologist at the Chessboard. Recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Howard fellowship. NIMH postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School. SLC, 1994–

BA, MA, University of Pavia, Italy. PhD, University of Milan-Bicocca. Special interests in linguistic anthropology, political oratory and ritual speech, vernacular practical philosophies, ethnopoetics, missionization, and the emergence of colonial discourse genres; ethnographic fieldwork in Southeast Asia (upland Sulawesi and East Timor); author of several articles on language and ethnicity, local theories of action, power and emotions, verbal art, and language ideologies. FCT postdoctoral research fellow at Institute of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics, Lisbon, and Endangered Languages Academic Programme (SOAS), London. SLC, 2009–

BA, University of Wisconsin-Madison. MA, MPhil, PhD candidate, Columbia University. Special interests include sub-Saharan African history, culture, and politics; colonialism and postcoloniality; issues of representation and the production of knowledge; experimental ethnography; commodities and the anthropology of consumption; spirit possession, witchcraft, and spectrality; reckonings of time and the politics of memory. Carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Dakar, Senegal; dissertation, “The Impossible Inheritance: Time, Memory, and Postcolonial Subjectivity at the Fann Psychiatric Hospital in Dakar, Senegal,” considers how the recent history of a well-known psychiatric hospital in Dakar has come to be recounted through personal narratives that also reflect discourses of national hope and hopelessness of the past, in the present, and for the future. Fellowships include the Fulbright-Hays (DDRA) Award and a Columbia University Travel Grant for dissertation research. SLC, 2007–

BA, Manchester University. MA, PhD, University of Washington. Ethnographic studies in East Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Areas of expertise include kinship theory, postcolonial studies, feminist anthropology, queer anthropology, educational studies, and oral history. Current work examines discourses of race, class, and kinship embedded in foster care and adoption, both domestically and transnationally. Co-author of Winds of Change: Women in Northwest Commercial Fishing and author of articles on gender, kinship, education, and sexuality; grants include Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research fellowship and Spencer fellowship; consultant, UNESCO. Associate Dean of the College, 2007-2012. SLC, 1992–