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Name
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Email - all "@columbia.edu"
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| Hanifa Abdul Sabur |
ha2154 |
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| Mireille Abelin |
ma457 |
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My dissertation, tentatively titled "Fiscal Sovereignty: Reconfigurations of Value and Citizenship in Post-Crisis Argentina," traces the Argentine state's efforts to stabilize notions of value and reconstitute citizens as taxpayers and users of national currency in teh wake of the financial crisis of 2001. Through multi-sited ethnographic research, I followed public debates surrounding tax payment and off-shore banking (or its equivalent, storing value in non-national currency) in the hopes of contributing to an anthropology of capitalism that takes seriously the fiscal and financial practices and subjectivities of middle and upper-class citizens. My scholarly interests have converged around the anthropology of value, exchange and property as productive analytics for exploring the affective life of economic practices, especially obligation to the nation-state and/or to other sovereign bodies. Critically attunded to the contemporary dynamics of memory, forgetting and debt that suffuse everyday life in Argentina, my work engages with categories of analysis such as sovereignty, nationalism, liberalism and populism as refracted through the Latin American experience.
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| Sonia Ahsan |
sa2320 |
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| Kitana Ananda |
ksa2103 |
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| Elizabeth Angell |
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| My work focuses on the politics of public memory in modern Istanbul, exploring how people and institutions imagine, remember, and negotiate the city's history. I am interested in how changing practices of preservation, consumption, and memorialization shape the urban imaginary, and in particular the contested relationship between the contemporary city and its Ottoman past. While my research will primarily deal with modern Turkey, I also hope to contextualize my work on Istanbul by exploring other cities with comparable experiences of rupture, other sites of commemoration and forgetting. |
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| Heather Atherton |
hna4 |
| Heather Atherton is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. She is a historical archaeologist concentrating on European and Native American interactions in North America, colonialism, and identity. Previous work has explored Choctaw ethnicity in post-removal Indian Territory during the nineteenth century. Her current research focuses on the expression of Hispanic identity during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Spanish colonial New Mexico. |
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| Justin Anspach |
jaa2165 |
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I am a historical archaeologist whose interests center around state ideology, cultural relations, complex politics, and popular notions of magic/science. I am particularly interested in examining how these themes are reflected and enforced by the material record of society and I am focusing my examination in the Andes, specifically the Ancient Inca.
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| Anschaire Aveved |
aa2634 |
| So far, I have been examining the ways people in sub-Saharan Africa experience the issue of cultural identity as inherited from intellectuals at the time of national independence movements, focusing on contemporary urban art and the birth of museums in rural areas. My current interest is to investigate the relation between the international circulation of art objects, the making-up of identities and the politics of 'culture' in Central Africa. |
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| Anuj Bhuwania |
ab2303 |
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| Matthew Black |
mdb2103 |
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| Anderson Blanton |
ab2312 |
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My dissertation project, "Lay Thy Hand Upon the Radio: The Materiality of a Religious Phenomenon," explores the intertwining of experiences of transcendence and tele-technology within the context of a charismatic Christian radio broadcast in the mountains of Appalachia.
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| Tamar Blickstein |
tb121 |
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| Adam Bund |
ahb2004 |
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I am a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. My research concerns the forms of language, imagination, and calculative practice that structure acts of economic comparison. I am currently completing a dissertation on emergent Chinese discourses of zizhu chuangxin (indigenous or endogenous innovation) and their highly mediated path from research institutes and government offices to regional software parks and animation incubators. My research interests include accounts of complex labor under conditions of putative neoliberalism, the relationship between the Chinese State and its citizens in the context of high-technology development, and the modes of transnational citationality which shape those spaces (like software parks) designed to foster innovation. I have also taught as a lecturer at the Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management.
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Christina Verano Carter
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cvs2103
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| Two sets of interests. One, modernisms and dissidence in Central/Eastern Europe (with especial focus on the Czech Republic) tracked through alchemical myths conjoined to present day practices of surrealism. Current research takes place in Prague, and examines the myth of Faust in Czech folklore, popular culture, space, and its surrealist avant-garde. More generally, I am interested in the history of surrealism conceived as a mode of resistance, with Chicago and Prague as key sites where this unfolds. The second, a project that sets out to develop questions about contemporary labor in the Philippines emerging from recent state and foreign investors' cultivation of economic zones, with particular interest on labor involving voice recording, transmission, and amplification technologies. |
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| Jon Carter |
jhc2010 |
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| Clare Casey |
cc2325 |
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| Yogesh Chandrani |
yrc4 |
I am interested in questions of violence, memory and history, the anthropology of religion and secularism, political theory, post-colonial theory and
South Asia. My dissertation, tentatively entitled "Legacies of Colonial History: The
Partition of India and the Making of Gujarati Regionalism" explores themes of memory,
history and violence as they relate to boundary formation and contestation in post-1947 Gujarat, India.
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| Ho-jun Chang |
hc294 |
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| Xenia Cherkaev |
xac2101 |
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"Take a chair from Ikea," I was told last summer while drinking on a St. Petersburg park bench, "it might have everything right--the size, and even the aesthetic's fine, it fits ok, but I don't know how to sit in it." My project begins in Russia about fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union replaced an epoch characterized by material scarcity with the present heady influx of disposable goods. It asks how history is felt in the material--like certain icons are felt to be saturated by past prayer, or certain worn chairs felt to be more livable than new ones. Asking how things startle us and what can evoke affect, I attempt to write a new history of post-Socialist Russia by tracing the changing relations to spiritual and secular things, from the Soviet epoch of material standardization and scarcity, to the dramatic post-Soviet proliferation of disposable products and public resurgence of Orthodox Christianity. How do these different regimes affect not only what things can mean, but also what they can do--surprising us and compelling us to act? How is the undisposable enframed, making us responsible, to things as well as people? To examine this, my project is situated at the intersection of two conceptual fields: 1) the widely recognized concept of namolennost--a viscerally experienced spiritual saturation acquired by an icon or place through centuries of prayer; and 2) the felt secular history of use, like the "enwalled vibration" of a 300 year old cello, or the "warming" quality of certain worn down utensils, old wooden furniture, and books.
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| Petar Cvijovic |
pc2458
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Archaeology of the recent and contemporary Jewish past in Poland.
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Madeline Elish
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mce2102
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| Maria Ferro |
mdf2112 |
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| Felipe Gaitan-Ammann |
fg2112 |
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| Goutam Gajula |
gg97 |
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| Elizabeth Gelber |
erg2103 |
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| Amanda Gilliam |
aog2102 |
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| Seema Golestaneh |
sg2166 |
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| Brigham Golden |
bmg9 |
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| Victoria Gross |
vgg2108
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| Victoria Gross completed her MA in Hindu Studies at McGill University in 2008. Her MA thesis examined the performance of two pain-inflicting corporeal rituals, kāvaṭi and viratam, among male Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Montréal. Specifically, she explored the intersections of vexed masculine, ethnic, and national identity that emerge in ecstatic public performances of devotional self-sacrifice. Her current research interests include ritual theory, national identity in the Tamil diaspora, and constructions of hyper-masculine militancy in South Asian nationalist organizations. |
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| Murat Guney |
mkg2116
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| I am studying the significant gap between the imagined and material effects of the policies of contemporary institutions of governance, and the role of the modern subject in the formation and reconfiguration of this gap. Therefore, I am questioning how the imposition of governmental policies is perceived, negotiated and reshaped by the poor Kurdish populations in Turkey. I am looking at the lived experiences of bio-power and the reconfiguration of power relations by the target populations during the civil-war process. Moreover, race theory in general and racism in Turkey in particular are topics with which I am concerned. |
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| Trisha Gupta |
tg2028 |
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| Guangtian Ha |
gh2217 |
| I am primarily concerned with how Chinese people "making Other" during the transitional period that spans from late imperial China to now. In contrast to the western genealogy of the discourses on violence, desire, death, etc, I intend to articulate through studies on different "others"(ethnic minorities, immigrant workers, women, even merchants, etc.) against the changing Chinese context an alternative approach of "Othering"--as I see it, this is an inquiry that not only tries to address the presently widely discussed question of Chinese "modernity", but also endeavors to understand how Chinese people, in the face of successive swirly changes of over 200 years, "make sense" of both their past and present life. "Making Other" is in this sense always first and foremost already a "making" of "self". |
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| Kaori Hatsumi |
kh2211 |
| My project examines how a community of Tamil-speaking, Roman Catholic fisherpersons and their families (who were internally displaced by civil war in Northern Sir Lanka and have now been relocated to a refugee camp) reconstitutes itself as a social group whose being-in-the-world is grounded in maritime ecology. |
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| Krista M. Hegburg |
kmh55 |
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| Katherine Heupel |
keh2131 |
| In the process of be-coming a historical archaeologist. Currently, working to develop a dissertation on the communal manifestations in Taos, New Mexico exploring issues of materiality and ideology/philosophy of counterculture movements, efforts, and lived experiences in the form of the hippie communes that located themselves in northern New Mexico in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Also interested in post-1960s communal boom appropriations and commodifications of aspects of social life in the 1960s, within and without the communes and current counterculture projects that may relate tangentially to the experience or spirit of the 1960s communal efforts. |
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| Thushara Hewage |
tnh2001 |
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My dissertation investigates the linkages between the legal and governmental regimes of emergency and welfare in modern Sri Lanka and their centrality to the sovereign order of the postcolonial state. My research approaches this reframing of the question of the political in Sri Lanka through the locus of the event of the 1971 insurrection on the island and its aftermaths. I also have a broad disciplinary interest in the location of the authority that underwrites anthropology's knowledge, and its adequacy to the task of identifying pressing political questions of the postcolonial present.
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| Anne Hohman |
akh2002 |
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United States; media, expressive culture and consumption; late capitalism; race, gender and especially class; American middle class. My dissertation project explores a country music "scene" in Brooklyn, NY.
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| Zachary Hooker |
zrh2101 |
| Fields of interest: anthropology of media, visual anthropology, politics & aesthetics, new media; Area specialty: East Asia, focus on South Korea; Nascent dissertation ideas: contemporary South Korean cinema, social criticism in film/art, the politico-economic factors that enable widespread media literacy and popularity, genre and auteurism, media & everyday life. |
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| Megan Huston |
mmh2004 |
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Nasser Hussain
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nh2321 |
| Muslim minorities in Europe, especially the UK. |
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| Michelle Hwang |
mh2859 |
| My work focuses on the politics of public memory in modern Istanbul, exploring how people and institutions imagine, remember, and negotiate the city's history. I am interested in how changing practices of preservation, consumption, and memorialization shape the urban imaginary, and in particular the contested relationship between the contemporary city and its Ottoman past. While my research will primarily deal with modern Turkey, I also hope to contextualize my work on Istanbul by exploring other cities with comparable experiences of rupture, other sites of commemoration and forgetting. |
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| Mythri Jegathesan |
mj2114 |
| Mythri Jegathesan (Third-Year with Advanced Standing) received her Masters from Columbia in 2005. Her past research interests include the socialization of children in civil conflict, communal violence, and ideologies of trauma among Sri Lankan Tamil youth participating in violence. Her dissertation will focus on the effects of NGO development discourse and practice on the state of community among Hill Country Tamil tea estate workers in Central Sri Lanka. |
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| Etsuko Kasai |
ek555 |
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| Sumaya Kassamali |
sk3401 |
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John Kennedy
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jmk2198
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Munira Khayyat
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mk2275 |
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Christine Soo-Young Kim
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csk2140 |
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Firat Kurt
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fk2256 |
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Seung-Cheol Lee
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sl3245 |
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| Yixin Li |
yl2041 |
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| Nadia Loan |
nl254 |
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Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo
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| Kazuma Maetakenishi |
km357 |
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| Amiel Melnick |
abm37
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| Natalia Elsa Mendoza-Rockwell |
enm2109 |
| Natalia would like to understand something about power, especially about the kind of power that informal-illegal organizations exercise-resist. Every time she has the opportunity to do so, she comes up with a story about drug-traffickers-ranchers from the Mexican-US border. She wants to go to East Africa to see if she can a)renew her repertoire of stories b)see how other forms of storytelling and moral orders interact with other-same forms of informal-illegal-screwed up labor. From there to: the elaborations on solitude in different traditions (from wild hunters to hermits), China's power in East Africa, anti-colonial political thought, corruption, witchcraft, ethnographies of the State, Historical-Anthropology, cock-fights. |
| Maya Mikdashi |
mtm2116 |
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| Ana Miljanic |
asm2004 |
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| Jun Mizukawa |
jm2063 |
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| John Molenda |
jpm2141 |
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Mark Mulder
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mmm2305 |
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| Natacha Nsabimana |
nn2271 |
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Tzu-Chi Ou
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to2212 |
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| Kristin Ruppel |
ktr2 |
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| Hector Saenz |
his2107
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| I am interested in post-foucauldian outlooks on power, knowledge production, subject formation, and self-interpretation, especially concerning identities and social categories that carry some sort of stigma. For some time I have been interested in the topics like illness, scapegoating, and deviance, particularly concerning the way discourses that appeal to universal criteria, proven scientific facts, or neutral technical expertise tend to overstep their boundaries, just as those that seem to simply represent everyone’s best interest (like the right to health or security) usually rest on disavowed exclusions. As a consequence, I have lately reflected upon the construction of addiction as a very peculiar disease and of ‘drug addicts’ and police officers as stigmatized subjects |
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Matthew Sanger
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mcs2178
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My current research interests lie in the confluence between memory, identity, and space. The interplay between these three loci helps to explain the construction of monuments, the politics of nationalism, and the rabid belief in the supremacy of the local football team. Obviously the interplay of power, the control over media, and the resultant manifestation of action are integral to my research interest. I am presently engaging this interest through archaeological research on a set of 4,000 year old Native American sites off of the coast of Georgia, USA.
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| Manuel Schwab |
mss2118 |
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Christopher Santiago
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cs2569 |
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Dianne Scullin
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dms2193
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I possess a long-standing interest in Andean archaeology, both having excavated in Peru and producing an M.Phil thesis concerning Moche ceramic production. Recently I have become interested in music archaeology and its potential application within Andean archaeology. My proposed project will focus on the music and performance of the Moche, who occupied the northern coastal valleys of Peru from about 100 – 800 AD. Through an analysis of musical instruments, iconography and performance spaces, I hope to gain insight into the social and political areas of life in Moche society.
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| Ozge Serin |
ons8 |
| Ozge Serin is currently writing her dissertation on the mass hunger strike undertaken by leftist political prisoners in Turkey to protest the transition to F-type prisons modeled after the US-style maximum security prisons, legalized by the Anti-Terror Law of 1991. She is interested in political violence with a particular focus on the relationship between the violence of law and the act of sacrifice. Informed by Marxist critical theory, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism, she is also interested in tracing the formation of political subjectivities and their self-inscriptions in different forms of media. |
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Aarti Sethi
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as3919 |
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| Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins |
scr60 |
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Nomi Stone
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nss2129
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Nomi Stone is interested in mourning and conceptions of the soul and the afterlife in the Middle East, as well as Diaspora and refugee issues in the region. In the past, she has worked on questions of mourning, ritual, and homeland in the Jewish community of Djerba, Tunisia, and on Islam, magic, and pilgrilmage in Fes, Morocco. Her first book of poems, Stranger's Notebook, based on her work in Tunisia, was published in 2008 by Northwestern University Press, TriQuarterly Books.
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| Anand Vivek Taneja |
avt2109 |
| My work focuses on the contemporary practises and politics around medieval ruins in Delhi. I am interested in the public lives of History; in the continuation and contestation of Islamic forms of legality, belief, worship and being in the largely Hindu-secular polity of modern India; exploring the possibilities of 'material history'(following Benjamin and Pierce); and in trying to integrate popular Islamic belief with contemporary Western philosophical and anthropological theory. |
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| Antonio Tomas |
aat2112 |
| I have worked as a journalist and literary critic in Angola and Portugal, and am the author of two books: The Maker of Utopias, a Biography of Amilcar Cabral (Tinta da China, 2007), and Poligrafia, a collection of essays (Casa das Letras, 2009). My dissertation is on the lives of informal entrepreneurs in Angola, and my interests include economy, literature, nationalism, language, and African intellectuals, among many others. |
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| Sarah Vaughn |
sev2112 |
| I am preoccupied with questions concerning the production of knowledge, print media, and meaning(s) of work in Guyana and the larger Caribbean region. My ethnographic research examines journalists? work, information-media policy and their entanglement with Guyana?s different modalities of state rule and their associated political projects. I question how this entanglement has historically constituted meanings of: accountability, landscape, liberal citizenship, and a local discourse about human rights. A second and related set of concerns is with examining how differing disciplinary modes of representation frame critical theory debates about the Caribbean as an anthropological site of knowledge. |
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| Darryl Wilkinson |
daw2142 |
| My research interests are broadly concerned with the ways in which the manipulation of landscapes and objects within them worked to shape past human societies. My fieldwork in based in central Peru, focusing on imperial Inka and early colonial contexts; and for my dissertation project I plan to carry out survey and excavations at a series of Inka coca plantations in the Amaybamba region (just north of Machu Picchu and the 'Sacred Valley'). This project is intended to consider the ways in which the crafting and disciplining of the landscape, also disciplined and ordered bodies and human subjects within the context of the Inka imperial project. |
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| Erin Yerby |
edy2101 |
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| Kwang-Kyoon Yeo |
ky94 |
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