Name

Email - all "@columbia.edu"

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.

I am interested in exploring the relationship between human and material agency, particularly in regard to late 19^th and early 20^th century Jewish life in America. By focusing on material culture of American Jews, my goal is to understand the ways in which a material world is intertwined with social, especially how materiality affects particular and general social practices and identities. In addition to archaeological theory, materiality, and questions of interaction between people and things in past and contemporary societies, my interests also include Yiddish culture, literature and heritage in Eastern Europe and the United States.

vgg2108

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.

My research interests revolve around mourning (both as a profession, ie. "professional mourners" and as a public act such as the Shia holiday of Muharram). In addition, I am interested in trauma, memory, and the creation of social memories that transcend official narratives. I have a nacent, but burgeoning interest in the Taliban and Al Qaeda (as authors of alternative universalisms), the politics of gas and oil pipelines (in Afghanistan and Central Asia) as well as the ironies of state-less, trans nationalisms such as the type developing in Afghanistan.

My current research is concerned with subverting a divide between self-present-living-matter and thought particularly as it plays out in anthropological theory and ethnographic practices and trying to devise a way to express material knowing through Charles S. Peirce, anarchist practices and postmodern aesthetics. I work on non-narrative aesthetics and the material realities and human event time of artists in postindustrial economies. My areas range from New York to Japan and Europe and historically from Dada & Futurism through the American Avant-Garde, Butoh and current manifestations of hyper-mediated compositional performance. I think through concepts of waiting, delay, flesh and the banal violences of contemporary civilization.

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.

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.

Nomi Stone

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.