Name

Email - all "@columbia.edu"

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.

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.

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.

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.

Archaeology of the recent and contemporary Jewish past in Poland.

vgg2108

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.

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.

Hsiu-ju Stacy Lo

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.