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.

I am currently completing my dissertation titled "When All that is Revolution Melts into Air: The Disenchantment of Leftist Levantine Intellectuals," examining the collapse of Marxist thought and practice in the Levant through focusing on the intellectual and political trajectories of a generation (born around 1940) of prominent public intellectuals.  Through engaging political memoirs, newspaper archives, party documents, theoretical texts as well as interviews, this work explores the ideological transformations in the region, the vexed relations of intellectuals to political commitment as well as the shifting articulations of Western metropolitan fields of cultural production to Arab peripheral ones.

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.

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.

In my research I am concerned with the intersection of state formations and colonial techniques of power, alongside the medicalization of social identities.  My dissertation, "Viral Citizens: Contagion, Corporeality, and HIV/AIDS in Colonial Puerto Rico," focuses on HIV/AIDS as a political preoccupation in Puerto Rico, local and diasporic histories of social justice activism around HIV/AIDS, and contemporary debates over competing notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and self-determination.  I specialize in Caribbean and Latin American societies, with an emphasis on Puerto Rico, and my areas of interest include: the relationship between nation/states and the health of their populations; race, class, sexuality, and gender in relation to various national imaginaries; social histories of of the AIDS epidemic; the law as a space of contention; social movements and political activism; radical feminisms and queer epistemologies; the history of medicine, anthropology, and ethnography; and emergent structures of global health governance.

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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.

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 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 focuses on the experience of exile and self-identification among the Iraqi community in London.  Through life history with Iraqi exiles from different backgrounds, I document the persecution suffered under Saddam Hussein's regime since the 1970s, the journey to exile, life in exile in London, and relationships among members of the diasporic Iraqi community therein.  In particular, I examine the prominence of sectarianism since the 1990s, which reflects a new phenomenon among Iraqis (whether in exile or in Iraq), whereby a person is defined foremost by his/her religious and ethnic groups (Jews, Assyrians, Kurds, Shias, and political dissidents) has been part and parcel of the structure of the Iraqi state since its inception in 1921.  Therefore my project considers the British colonial legacy in Iraq since the narratives and institutions of state set into motion by the British party under Saddam in particular.  In this way I provide a historical analysis of sectarianism and identity politics of Iraqi exiles specifically, and in Iraq more generally, critiquing the worn assumption that conflict in Iraqi society arises from primordial hatreds of pre-modern ethnic and religious groups, rather than specific political histories that are distinctly modern.

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.