Faculty News
2012-13
The Anthropology Department welcomes new faculty members:
Adia Benton, Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Dr. Benton received her BA in human biology from Brown University, an MPH in international health from Rollins School of Public Health at Emory, and a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. She is a medical anthropologist with interests in science and technology studies, and political and legal anthropology in sub-Saharan Africa (Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Mozambique). Her research in medical anthropology includes work on HIV/AIDS, essential surgical care, race and DNA ancestry, post-conflict development, humanitarianism and gender violence.
Melissa Hackman, Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender Studies. Dr. Hackman received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her scholarly interests include masculinity, sexuality, southern Africa, and transnational Pentecostalism. She has done extensive research on an 'ex-gay' and sexual addiction ministry in Cape Town, South Africa.
Jennifer Stampe, Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology. Dr. Stampe earned her B.A. in Religion and Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Her interests bridge cultural, historical, and museum anthropology.
Peter van Dommelen - Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Peter van Dommelen is a Mediterranean archaeologist, whose research and teaching revolve around the rural Mediterranean past and present. The regional focus of his work lies in the western Mediterranean, where he carries out long-term fieldwork on the island of Sardinia. He concentrates on later Mediterranean prehistory and the earlier part of Classical Antiquity - roughly the first millennium BCE – but comparative studies of ethnographic and recent historical context in the Mediterranean and elsewhere play a crucial role in his research and teaching.
Jessaca Leinaweaver received the Jose Maria Arguedas Article Award.
Paja Faudree received the Wendy J. Strothman Faculty Research Award in the Humanities for 2012-13 for her proposal titled "Magic Mint: A Linguistic Ethnography of the Global Salvia Trade".
Paja Faudree and Josh Tucker received a Humanities Initiative Grant to do a workshop in 2012-13 on Indigenous Music.
Patricia Rubertone received a Salomon Teaching Enrichment Grant for Who Owns the Past? (ANTH0066D), Semester I, 2012-13.
New discovery by Stephen Houston and his team of archaeologist in El Zotz, Guatemala
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2011-12
The Anthropology department welcomes two new faculty members:
Rebecca Carter as Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology. Dr. Carter received her Ph.D. from University of Michigan in Cultural Anthropology. Her research, conducted in post-Katrina New Orleans, focuses broadly on the nature and experience of urban dwelling, particularly the social, political, and environmental conditions of vulnerability and violence, and the creative ground-level processes that bring about resilience, cultural survival, and meaningful social change. At Brown, Dr. Carter will teach courses in US Cultures, Anthropology of Disaster and Anthropology of Race and Gender.
Felipe Gaitan-Ammann as Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology. Dr. Gaitan-Ammann received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in Anthropology. His research focuses on slavery in Central America, especially material culture remains of slave traders and slave trading in Panama, and on later periods of historical archaeology. At Brown, Dr. Gaitan-Ammann will teach courses in the areas of Mesoamerica and Historical Archaeology. His fall course is entitled The City, the Maroon, and the Mass Grave.
Paja Faudree receives the American Philosophical Society Franklin Research grant and was the winner of this year's Strothman Research Award for the Humanities.
Jessaca Leinaweaver receives the Howard Fellowship
Andrew Scherer receives the Henry Merritt Wriston Fellowship
Sherine Hamdy awarded a year at Institute for Advanced Studies.
Andrew Scherer's field project is the cover story, "Defending a Jungle Kingdom," in Archaeology Magazine.
Andrew Scherer awarded NSF grant for his project "Warfare and Polity in the Region of La Mar, Chiapas, Mexico'.
Lina Fruzzetti named Interim Diversity Officer
Stephen Houston receives Guatemala's highest honor
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2010-11
Jessaca Leinaweaver won the 2010 Margaret Mead Award for her book.
Andrew Scherer's recent project...
Catherine Lutz awarded the Society for the Anthropology of North America Distinguished Career Prize for 2010
Jessaca Leinaweaver received National Science Foundation Award
The Anthropology Department welcomes new faculty members:
Andrew Scherer as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Dr. Scherer is an anthropological archaeologist and biological anthropologist whose work investigates ancient humans as both cultural and biological beings. Scherer is co-director of the Sierra del Lacandón Regional Archaeology Project, a collaborative team of researchers that conducts archaeological research at Classic period (A.D. 250- 900) Maya sites in Petén, Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico. This project seeks to develop a comparative perspective on Maya polities through the investigation of archaeological sites from across the settlement hierarchy—from rural hamlets to polity capitals. Scherer is investigating the process by which some Classic Maya sites evolved from city-states to regional hegemonic powers and is presently researching the role of mortuary ritual in creating and maintaining the Maya body politic. Scherer completed a Ph.D. at Texas A&M University in 2004 and taught for the last several years at Baylor University. During his first year at Brown, he will be teaching courses in bioarchaeology and the anthropology of food.
Saida Hodžić as Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor of Gender Studies. Professor Hodžić received her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the joint degree program at the University of California San Francisco and University of California Berkeley in 2006 and an M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Cologne University in Germany in 2002, and is an Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at George Mason University. Her doctoral dissertation was entitled "Performing Development: Women's NGOs, Donors, and the Postcolonial Ghanaian State." She focuses on women’s rights activism in Ghana, pan-African and global interventions against female genital cutting, US humanitarianism and human rights activism, and changing regimes of citizenship in Germany. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Of Rebels, Spirits, and Social Engineers: The Awkward Endings of Female Genital Cutting, an ethnographic exploration of the making of female genital cutting as a category of knowledge and activist interventions. The project examines the changes produced by the engagements of Ghanaian NGOs with transnational science, public health, and international law, and has been awarded a Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for research and writing.
Becky Schulthies as ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology. Dr. Schulthies received her Ph.D in linguistic anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2009. She is one of 50 recent Ph.D.s from across the disciplines awarded an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellowship. Dr. Schulthies’ dissertation focuses on the social circulation of media scripts in Moroccan and Lebanese families' domestic conversations. Through domestic media ethnography of the reception of Pan-Arab entertainment and of religious and news programming, she explores functional literacies tied to intervisual cues and the management of intergenerational authority; a Pan-Arab language ideology; and the link between language, gender, and confessionalism in moral evaluations of media representations. She will teach courses in the areas of linguistic anthropology, Middle East anthropology, and the anthropology of media.
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2009-10
Daniel Smith received a research grant to study Pentecostalism and AIDS in Nigeria from the Templeton Foundation
Shepard Krech's book "Spirits of the Air" won the James Mooney Award from the Southern Anthropological Society for the best book on the anthropology of the South in 2009
Paja Faudree received a Cogut Fellowship for 2010-11
Jessaca Leinaweaver receives 2010 Advance Career Development Award
Marcy Brink-Danan's proposal, "Local News, Global Jews: An Ethnography of European Jewish Journalism, " has been selected to receive a 2010 Salomon Award
Daniel Smith receives Hewlett Foundation Grant
Lina Fruzzetti latest film "Songs of a Sorrowful Man"
Matthew Gutmann, appointed Vice President for International Affairs
Douglas Anderson and Wanni Anderson awarded NSF Grant
The Anthropology Department welcomes Bianca Dahl as Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology and Population Studies
Bianca received her PhD at University of Chicago. Her research explores how international humanitarian agendas and interventions affect individual subjectivity, patterns of sociality, and processes of social reproduction among the recipients of global aid. She is writing a book based on her dissertation research (“Left Behind? Orphaned Children, Humanitarian Aid and the Politics of Kinship, Culture, and Caregiving during Botswana’s AIDS Crisis”), an ethnographic study of Western charities aiming to provide “culturally sensitive” support to orphans and their kin in the wake of Botswana’s AIDS epidemic. Focusing on the politically charged spaces forged at the interstices between foreign and local childrearing ideologies, Bianca’s work demonstrates how these orphans have emerged as symbols of demographic upheaval, as well as skilled political actors in their own right.
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2008-09
Paja Faudree receives $15,000 Career Development Award
Dr. Faudree will organize and host two interrelated initiatives: a seminar series featuring extended visits by very prominent senior figures in the field of linguistic anthropology and a day-long symposium featuring both senior colleagues and junior women in the field who would benefit from mentoring opportunities. These proposed alliances represent an innovation in linguistic anthropology studies, which has been relatively slow to move in the direction of cross-disciplinary, collaborative research models. |
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Matthew Gutmann, named new Director of Center for Latin American and Carribean Studies
Paja Faudree and Jessaca Leinaweaver receive 2009 Salomon grants
Stephen Houston and Thomas Garrison awarded NSF grant for project entitled "Landscape Succession in Lowland Maya Archaeology".
Matthew Gutmann wins AAA 2008 Eileen Basker Memorial Award for his book "Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico". For more information click here.
Daniel Smith wins Margaret Mead Award for his book "A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria"
Stephen Houston named 2008 MacArthur Fellow
News
Brown Anthropology is off to an exciting start for the 2008-09 academic year. We are thrilled to announce the appointment of two new Assistant Professors, Drs. Sherine Hamdy and Jessaca Leinaweaver, who bring huge talent and impressive experience to our program.
Dr. Hamdy, who had been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Brown from 2006-08, is an authority on science, medicine, and medical ethics in the Islamic world and has done path-breaking field research on the interpenetrations of Islamic authority and contemporary biomedical authority over the ethical nature of the practice of organ transplantation in the contemporary Egyptian nation-state. She has a major book under contract with the University of California Press to be entitled “Our Bodies Belong to God: Islam and Bioethics in Egypt.” Next on her horizon is a new comparative field research project in which she will address prenatal genetic screening programs as they currently exist in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Dr. Hamdy was named to Brown’s distinguished Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professorship of the Social Sciences and International Affairs.
Dr. Leinaweaver, who had been an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is interested in a topic of global significance, the relocation of children through mechanisms such as visiting, migration, adoption, fosterage, apprenticeships, and domestic service. She has completed over two years of field research on these topics in the Peruvian Andes and has a major book in production with the Duke University Press to be entitled "The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru." She has begun two new research initiatives, one on how transnational labor migration transforms migrants' social responsibilities toward aging family members who are left behind, and another on two groups of young Peruvians who have moved to Spain: the children of economic migrants, and those who were adopted as children into Spanish families. Dr. Leinaweaver, while in the Department of Anthropology, will also strengthen the research and teaching missions of Brown's vibrant Population Studies and Training Center.
We have seen the future in the work of these two outstanding scholars and are delighted that the future is here in Brown’s Department of Anthropology.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Sarah Chase who recently received her Ph.D. in our graduate program and who teaches Anthropology at the Pomfret School is teaching Anthropology 0200 Culture and Behavior this semester. Dr. Chase’s compelling book, Perfectly Prep: Gender Extremes at a New England Prep School was just published by Oxford University Press.
For additional background on Professor Hamdy, see Today at Brown at http://today.brown.edu/faculty/2008/hamdy
For additional background on Professor Leinaweaver, see Today at Brown at http://today.brown.edu/faculty/2008/leinaweaver