Graduate Student Research Interests

 

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Research is carried out by a community of scholars composed of faculty, graduate students, visiting scholars and postdoctoral scholars. They work in every corner of the world, and their research spans the entire breadth of anthropology, from medical and biological anthropology to folklore and linguistic research.

Below is a list of graduate students and their research interests. If you are not listed here and should be, contact the webmaster.

Ahmed, Faiz (Social-Cultural). Research interests include legal anthropology; historical anthropology and social history; politics of law and development; transnational rhetoric of law and order; modern state formation; non-governmental organizations; human rights discourse; Islamic law and spirituality; legal modernization processes in the Middle East and Central/South Asia; Islam in the Americas.

Ahmed, Yalda is interested in social and cultural anthropology, illness narratives, mental illness, memory, political violence, transitional communities, immigration, refugees, trauma, ethnographic methods, family, tribal kinship, Afghanistan, Muslim communities, Middle East, and social sufferings.

Al-Bahloly, Saleem, (BA Anthropology, University of Chicago, 2005) I reconsider the structural-symbolic as a primal means of intelligibility that is formal, empty, and opaque. The structural-symbolic is a labor, and my project examines this labor of intelligibility - a labor done in proximity to death, at the threshold of chaos, at the point of fitna - through a historical ethnography of the practice of art in Baghdad in the 1940s and 1950s. I particularly investigate the realist turn this practice takes and how this turn disposes art to thinking through some of the questions that constitute the philosophic-epistemological ground of Ba’athist socialism in Iraq. The ambition is to produce a historical ethnography of modernity as a problem not of progress but of ruins.

Arenas, Ivan

Baer, Alex

Banales, Samuel

Bare, Christy, My research focuses on the examination of social memory, learning, and identity construction through analysis of archaeological textiles in the Andes.  This archaeological research will be coupled with ethnographic work among contemporary weaving communities in Peru.

Bartlett, Nicholas

Bascom, Jean

Beauchesne, Patrick, (Archaeology, 2005). Bioarchaeology, biological anthropology, paleopathology, skeletal biology and osteology, paleohistology, study of osteoporosis.

Beigi, Khashyar

Baliaev, Alex, research engages figures emergent in a polysemy of temporality and corporeality: aging, childhood, death, memory, trauma, affect, continuity, etc.  A method of this engagement ­ incipient in a relationship of ethnography to history ­ attempts to traverse areas between ethics and aesthetics.

Battle, James

Berkelman-Rosado, Sunya (Socio-cultural 2006) Belize, Latin America. Research interests include visual anthropology, post-colonial art, globalization, identity formation and processes, material culture, museum anthropology.

Blind, Eric

Browne-Ribeiro, Anna, I am interested in exploring notions of social complexity, human-land interactions, conceptions of time and place, and human intentionality in prehistory and in the present, as well as questions of national/regional, ethnic, indigenous, and gendered identity.  My current work on precolumbian Terra Preta sites in the Central Amazon brings together these interests in a project that aims, through archaeology and ethnography, to bring together contemporary and past conceptions of land, place, and space in order to build biographies and geographies of people and places.

Buckley, Ann Marie, Corporatization and globalization of biomedical knowledge/practice; disciplining processes in health care; neoliberalism and biomedical markets; managed care; aging in U.S. with emphasis on continuing care retirement communities; patient management teams;  sexualized violence in U.S; studying up, down and sideways; history of anthropology

Buccitelli, Anthony

Caduff, Carlo is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated from the University of Zurich in 2002 where he worked as an assistant at the Chair of the Department of the Social Studies of Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). He co-translated two books by Paul Rabinow into German: Anthropologie der Vernunft. Studien zu Wissenschaft und Lebensführung (Suhrkamp: 2004) and Was ist Anthropologie? (Suhrkamp: 2004). His interests include the anthropology of modernity, science and technology studies, biosecurity, avian influenza, post-genomics, and the history of anthropology. Carlo Caduff is a regular contributor to the newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Casareto, Ana Julia is research bio-evolutionary processes of neural development of H. sapiens as they affect transmission of cultural tendencies. In other words, what is it about the human brain that allows us to create, have, and live in culturally-laden societies.

Carter, Mitzi Uehara, (Socio-cultural, 2000) Okinawa; anthropology of militarism; cultural politics; nationalism, remapping "national security".

Chen, Kun, (Socio-cultural, 2005). is interested in transnational high-tech business practices between China and the US, and I am particularly looking at cross-cultural issues and problems associated with the globalization of innovation.

Chenoweth, John, Historical anthropology and archaeology; British Empire and the former British colonial world, especially the United States and Caribbean, 1500-1800; colonialism and identity, especially religious and national as well as race, class, and gender; Quakerism; post-colonial and social theory; archaeological method and theory.

Chiang, Chih-hua, (Archaeology, 2000) Neolithic period in Taiwan, intrasite spatial analysis, household archaeology, house society.

Jenny Chio, (Sociocultural, 2002) conducts research on tourism, identity, and visuality in rural villages in Southwest China.  Her interests include contemporary China, media studies, visual anthropology, and documentary image studies.

Chua, Emily, I am interested in working with media writers and producers in the PRC, to think through issues of mediation, value and cultural production in late-socialism.

Christensen, Kim, (Archaeology, 2004) My interests include historical archaeology, focusing on the household, within the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries.  I am interested in the study of social reform movements and activism, gender and women's history, and the intersection of identity and material culture.  In addition, my work incorporates feminist and practice theories, public archaeology, and consideration of the politics of archaeological and historical practice.

Coco, Linda, (Socio-cultural, 2000) Anthropology of Law and Political Ecology.

Cohen, David, (Archaeology, 1999) My interests include the past and its uses/abuses in southern Africa, social justice, the archaeology of the disenfranchised, colonialism, zooarchaeology, public archaeology, prison reform, graffiti, and photography. Currently I am conducting archaeological research in Botswana.

Cuelenaere, Laurence Linguistic anthropology, cognitive sciences, phenomenology and history. Sites of specific inquiry include belief, language and the moving body. My work is grounded in the 20th century history of the Aymara from Bolivia's Central Highlands where I research not only how the activity of walking functions in the semantic system of Aymara, how it constitutes enonciation and territorial representation, but also how these are invoked in Bolivian political discourses.

Cutthrell, Rob, Native lifeways and foodways in California were disrupted and systematically eradicated by Spanish colonizers. My research will focus on how changing foodways were used to articulate native identity through the contact period. My methodological approach will involve a household based high-resolution excavation strategy aimed at recovering macro- and microbotanical remains.

Daehnke, Jon, (Archaeology 2002): Research interests include archaeology and the law, cultural resource management, ownership of the past, Native American sovereignty and stewardship, survey strategy, landscape approaches to archaeology. Geographic area of interest is the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. Working dissertation title is "Utilization of space and the politics of place: Chinookan conceptions of landscape in the Portland Basin".

David, Robert

Devine, Jacob, research interests concern the state, development, and market economy transition in Southeast Asia, Vietnam specifically. I am particularly interested in investigating ethnographically the role played by management consultancies in these processes and the means by which managerial knowledges and practices constitute global technologies for "doing" capitalism within a late socialist context.

Dujnic, Teresa, I am an historical archaeologist working primarily in the Northeast United States. I am interested in exploring the creation of identity on the scale of the household and the mobilization of identities in contexts of social conflict. I am also interested in exploring strategies of public, community-based archaeology, throughout my work.

Dumas, Nate, (Linguistic, 2004) My research explores the US, English-speaking stuttering communities, specifically formed through the chapters of the National Stuttering Association.  I investigate the linguistic, pragmatic, and ideological dimensions of their speaking rituals (such as "introductions" and the "speaking circle") and attempt to understand how these rituals allow members to co-construct conceptions of "speaker-hood," "hearer," and "fluency" that are at work in mundane and formal interactions.

Dyckman, William, (Medical, 2002) China, Southeast Asia; international public health; suffering and the impulse to aid; the intersection of conflicting notions of sovereignty, modernity and the creation of the subject; health and human rights discourse; medicine and globalization.

Dzenovska, Dace, (Socio-cultural 2002) Interests: Postsocialism, European Union, neoliberalism, development, governmentality, politics of difference, Latvia

Elhaik, Tarek, (Socio-cultural, 2000) Co-curator of the San Francisco Arab Film Festival (1998-2000) and film series curator at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Berkeley (2000-2003). Teaches "Arab Cinema: Histories and Aesthetics" at San Francisco State University.Research Interests: Mexico; Avant-garde Aesthetics; Visual Anthropology; Documentary film and Newsreels; Curatorial practice.

Eppinger, Monica, (Socio-cultural, 2003) Law and anthropology; Mali; Ukraine.

Erickson, Brad, (Socio-cultural, 2002) I’m interested in the ways post-dictatorship Catalans and recent immigrants to Catalonia draw upon the region’s historical, linguistic and political decentering to cultivate an emergent ethical-sensorial field through public ritual. 

Ertl, John

Farfán, Elizabeth, (Medical Anthropology, 2005). Latin America, Brazil; African-Diaspora studies and Afro-identities; representations of citizenship, culture, & hope; anthropology of the body; performance studies; public art and film

Flexner, James, (Archaeology, 2005) My current research focuses on the ways in which material culture shaped and was shaped by processes of colonialism in Polynesia.  This work has taken me to Kalaupapa National Historical Park in Hawaii, where I am directing a project on the historical archaeology of a nineteenth century Hansen's disease (commonly called leprosy) settlement.

Foote, Monica

Friedner, Michele, I am interested in the role that international development organizations play in creating disability and deaf identities among urban disabled/deaf people in India. I am specifically interested in how these new identities affect family structures as well as the relevance of social movement theory for looking at this.

George, M Mather, My research focuses on four specific organizations in India that promote innovation in technology and entrepreneurship.  This project is framed around organizations that promote entrepreneurial creativity because a focus on innovative practices promotes future-oriented imaginaries where possible social worlds are articulated and negotiated.  How is this globally-imagined economy of the deregulation era influencing the ways in which urban, rural, national, and even historical borders and linkages are being constructed and negotiated?  And in these complex histories of location and economy, how is innovation being articulated in relation to values such as increased market share, profitability, national pride, poverty alleviation, self-sufficiency or sustainability?

Gill, Timothy

Gillette, Donna, (Archaeology, 2002) My research area is the Coastal Ranges of California, focusing on rock markings (rock art), believed to be the result of pre-historic ritual activity. With over 100 identified sites extending nearly the entire length of California, I am utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach to place the tradition in a cultural and geographical context. Recent Publication: "A Gathering of Voices: The Native Peoples of the Central California Coast" (2002) Santa Cruz History Journal #5

Giraudo, Rachel Faye, Dissertation research on cultural heritage, tourism, and development in southern Africa.

Goodwin, Marc, (Socio-cultural, 2003) My current research explores the question of why the United States has such comparatively high rates of diagnosis and treatment for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  I work with children and adults with ADHD, as well as doctors, educators, and pharmaceutical representatives. The first phase of my project consists of multi-sited research in the United States, and I hope to complete comparative work in Germany and the Netherlands during the second phase of my project.

Gomez, Esteban

Gonzalez, Sara Research interests include indigenous archaeology, decolonization, historical archaeology, the archaeology of colonialism, social archaeology, feminist archaeology, visual anthropology, and public outreach and interpretation.  Dissertation research focuses on the archaeology of colonialism and the development of the Kashaya Pomo Interpretive Trail at Fort Ross State Historic Park.

Green, E. Mara, (sociocultural & linguistic, 2005). Deafness and signed languages; communicative practices between fluent and home signers; rural spaces; queer theory; Nepal; linguistic anthropology and the self.

Griffen, Andrew, I am interested in hunter-gatherers of the Upper Paleolithic of Western Europe, their social-technological networks and practices, and patterns of mobility.  My methodological emphases are lithic analysis and microwear analysis.

Gürsel, Zeynep, is currently finishing a dissertation entitled "The Image Industry: The Work of International News Photographs in the Age of Digital Reproduction,"which draws on two years of ethnographic investigation on the production, distribution, and circulation of the international photojournalism industry at its centers of power in New York and Paris against the backdrop of "the most photographed war in history." Interests: visual anthropology, ethnographic and documentary film, anthropology of globalization and mass media, photography, the imagination, popular culture, constructions of the past, the Middle East

Hao, Andrew Research Interests: Contemporary China, Ethnography of Business, Globalizing forms of knowledge, Intimacy

Harkey, Anna

Harris, Lucille

Harris, Shana, (Medical, 2004) Drug use; harm reduction; science and technology studies; health movements and interventions; Latin America.

Hendy, Katie

Hensman, Derrick Michael, (Medical, 2002) I am presently learning about expert communities involved in the "global" surveillance of avian influenza (H5N1). More specifically, I am exploring conditions of collaboration among institutional experts (i.e. World Health Organization) and non-institutional experts (i.e. amateur ornithologists) involved in the surveillance of migratory birds. I am presently focusing on events in Northern Nigeria.

Henrickson, Celeste

Heo, Angie, (Socio-cultural, 2003) Egypt; Coptic Orthodoxy and Islam; religion, political theology; linguistic anthropology, hermeneutics, icons; postcolonialism.

Herman, Stanley B, Technology and the articulation of modernities (particulary regarding citizenship, state, and nature).  Genealogies of systems of rationality.

Henrickson, Celeste, Archaeometry, geoarchaeology, soils-geomorphology, paleoenvironmetal reconstruction, ethnoarchaeology, archaeology of western north america and latin america, archaeology of natural places, social archaeology, ethics in archaeology, and gender studies.

Hickler, Benjamin, (Medical, 2002) My interests include the anthropology of human and animal sciences.  I am currently working with scientists, veterinarians, policy makers, development aid officials, and livestock industry representatives in Australia who are involved in a project to transform the basic infrastructure established in the Southeast Asian response to the SARS epidemic into a permanent regional system for infectious disease control. Next year I hope to visit sites of program implementation in Indonesia and the Lower Mekong River Region to observe how participating smallholders negotiate new regulatory requirements for the control of "transboundary animal diseases."

Higashi, Robin, Research Areas of Interest: children's health in urban U.S. clinics; moral and political economies of health; medical education and the socialization of physicians; production of subjectivity ."The 'Worthy' Patient: The Moral and Political Economy of Clinical Medical Education" (presented at 2006 SMA/SfAA Conference in Vancouver, BC; publication forthcoming in 2007.

Holmes, Seth, (Medical, MD/PhD, 2000) Latin America, rural and urban U.S.; medical anthropology, the violence continuum, symbolic power, migration and diaspora, social suffering. 

Howlett Hayes, Kat, dissertation research involves understanding the colonial construction of racial categories, and interactions of African and Native American groups, at a 17th-century New York plantation site.  I am interested in archaeologies of identity, materiality and memory, and pragmatic approaches to knowledge construction.

Huang, Cindy, (Socio-cultural, 2003) My research focuses on the conjuncture of gendered development visions in northwestern China. I am particularly interested in how Muslim Uyghur women interact with discourses and technologies of development and in the process shape dynamic narratives of self and community.

Hui, Julie, is interested in the use of computer simulation and its role in plausibility testing with respect to several lines of inquiry including: comparative neurobiology and neuroanatomy, selection pressures in the evolution of the human brain, social-biological co-evolutionary interactions, semiotics and its role in biology and culture, and the processes underlying the emergence of novel selection pressures.

Husman, Daniel, (Socio-Cultural, 2004) Modernity and nationalism in contemporary China, the Olympics as a site of social reform, globalization, post-socialism, social theory

Hwang, Michelle

Jarosz, Monika, Mexico, Social/Indigenous Movements, Politics of Identity, Ethnicity, The Social Production of Historical Consciousness, Collective Memories, Religion, and Syncretism.

Jenks, Angela, (Medical, 2000) My research interests focus on the politics of difference in U.S. health care, and I am currently working on my dissertation, entitled "'Cultural Competency' and the Medical Management of Difference." Drawing on work in critical medical anthropology, urban ethnography, and social studies of science and knowledge, this project addresses the promises and perils of multicultural health care by examining the ways in which concerns over health disparities, racial and ethnic demographic shifts, and the need for "cultural competency" affect health institutions and medical care in Los Angeles, California.

Jones, Alexandra

Kalofonos, Ippolytos. My dissertation research explores the rise of evangelical movements as a new form of citizenship in and around HIV/AIDS in Mozambique. I am generally interested in science and technology studies and medical anthropology, social suffering, critical studies of development, and critical clinical medical anthropology.

Kelley, Elizabeth

Kellogg, Christopher

Kloos, Stephan, (Medical Anthropology 2004) Research Areas: India, Himalayas, Tibet. Areas of Interest: Medical Anthropology, Science and Governmentality Studies, Anthropology of Ethics. Research Title: Tibetan Medicine in Exile: the ethics, politics, and science of cultural survival.

Kurtovic, Larisa, (Socio-Cultural/Linguistic, 2005). Former Yugoslavia and diaspora. Post-socialism, time, memory, nostalgia.

Langlitz, Nicolas, (Medical, 2003) United States, Germany, Biomedicine, Neuropharmacology, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, Genetics, Biotechnology and privatization of science more generally.

Leite, Naomi, leite@berkeley. Research interests include social memory, globalization and diaspora, emergent ethnic and religious identities, kinship, language and culture, tourism, and material culture/materiality. My dissertation, Global Affinities: Memory, Materiality, and Kinship in the Portuguese Marrano-Anusim Revival Movement, examines a global movement devoted to recovering "lost" pre-Inquisition Portuguese Jewish heritage. Based on multi-sited fieldwork in several countries, including 18 months in Portugal, the dissertation explores the role of tourism, the internet, and other forms of international contact in forging affective ties among movement participants and shaping their experiences of self, kinship, and belonging.

Lemons, Katherine, is researching Islamic law and secularism. She am currently conducting field research in Delhi and Lucknow, India, where I am looking at different bodies of local adjudication, both Muslim and secular, attending to the ways in which the two work together as well as at cross-purposes and in which they are informed by one another.  The various ways in which gender works and is made to work in these contexts is central to the research.

Linford-Steinfeld, Joshua, (Medical, 1998) United States; anthropology of the body: eating, exercise, drinking (alcohol), and consumption; gender and sexuality (particularly men); discipline and regimentation, order and disorder, loss and excess, will, and aggression; psychiatry and psychoanalysis; military (particularly the Navy).

Liu, Jennifer, (Medical Anthropology 2002). Jennifer A. Liu is a doctoral candidate in the UCB-UCSF Joint Program in Medical Anthropology.  She works at the intersection of Medical Anthropology and Science Studies and her research interests include transnational science and biotechnology, and cross-cultural bioethics. Her dissertation studies  stem cell research and policy-making in Taiwan.

Lucko, Jennifer

Mahaffey, Erin

Mahiri, Jelani K. (Socio-cultural, 1997) Social Inequality; Folklore; Brazil, Latin America; Visual Anthropology (Photography, Video/Film, integration of text/word and image); Childhood and Life-cycle; Urban Anthropology.

Mamut, Tatyana, (Socio-cultural, 2000) Post-Soviet Russia/Eurasia.  Socio-economic Change.  Political Economy. Marketing, Advertising, and Consumerism.  Global Organizations.  Needs, Value, and Economic Behavior.  Personhood and Individualism.  Anthropology of the Future.  Interventions in New Institutional Economics, Economics of Transition, and Globalization Theory.

Marek, Ora

Marsilli-Vargas, Xochiquetzal

Matsunaga, John Michael, Research Interests: Archaeological method and theory, materiality, socio-politics of archaeology, household archaeology, space and place, visual culture, ceramic analysis, prehistoric figurines, social inequality, European prehistory

May, Shannon, (Socio-cultural, 2002) Research interests include systems of knowledge, in particular sustainability, science and environmentalism; discourses and practices of national and personal development; technologies of transformation; citizenship; and economics. Currently working in Huangbaiyu, China, with a focus on the promise and effects of a transnational project to create a “sustainable development demonstration village” that will modernize the countryside without environmental degradation.

May, Suepattra, research interests include women's mental and reproductive health, sexuality, subjectivity, modes of disease screening, risk perception and the convergence of women's sexuality, the body, gender and technology. I am currently crafting a doctoral research project around conceptions of intimacy among women engaged in casual sexual encounters facilitated by the internet, and the ideology circulating at the level of discourse and within the individual around these practices.

McBratney, Michael

McCoy, Mark

McIntyre, Adrian, (Socio-cultural, 1999) My current research interests include the anthropology of the contemporary, technologies of production, signification, power, and the self; international humanitarianism, civilian-military relations, private military and security companies, and the "Global War on Terror."  I am writing a dissertation titled "States of Emergency: Humanitarianism, Politics, and the Market in Mercy" based on field research in Iraq and Sudan.

McPhail, Theresa, completed an interdisciplinary Master's Degree in Science Studies at New York University, exploring the philisophical implications of retroviral remnants in the human genome. Her thesis, "The Viral Gene", was published in the journal Science as Culture. Upon obtaining the Master's, she moved to Hong Kong, where she lived for three years studying Chinese and doing on-the-ground research on bird flu. Currently, she is in the Medical Anthropology program, focusing on the bird flu virus as a potent symbol for the intersection of international politics, global public health, and biosecurity.

Mercado, Saul, (Linguistic, 2001) The scope of my academic trajectory encompasses investigations about language politics and language normalization within contested multilingual contexts in Catalonia, Spain.  My various projects have involved inquiries from various points of view :  the incorporation of newly-arrived immigrant adolescents within Catalan society and the Catalan school system, codeswitching and language contact between more than two languages, Catalan language pedagogical practices, Catalan language revitalization campaigns, and the juncture between power, mass media, and language. 

Modzelewski, Darren, (Archaeology, 2003) Identity formation, race, ethnicity, contact, colonialism of New England, Native American Studies, ehtno-archaeology, public archaeology, consultation, NAGPRA, and the intersection of archaeology and the law.

Molino, Theresa, My research interests begin with a focus on the social lifeways of what is generally termed the "Jomon Culture" of the Japanese archipelago. Specifically, I am interested in a comparative analysis of material culture from diverse areas in Japan, focusing on the Jomon to Yayoi era transition at multiple sites.

Montoya, Alfred, My interest is in emerging technologies and rationalities brought to bear in the recent past around projected biological threats in Vietnam. I trace the development of a type of technology deployed to create a space to deal with an ascendant risk by taking as its target and placing at stake the norms, values and forms of individual and collective existence for a given population. I am interested in how they failed (or not) in the recent past and will fail or not in the near future, and how these developments lead to new configurations of politics, ethics and technology. I am interested, broadly, in modernity as an anthropological problem, the global, bio-security, ethics, and Southeast Asia.

Moore, Marcus, (Socio-Cultural, 2005). United States; anthropology of education, political economy, neoliberalism, race and ethnicity, class mobility, politics of love

Morgan, Colleen, (Archaeology, 2005) I am interested in exploring the tensions between the virtual and the actual in archaeology.  Some aspects of this include social networks, photography, geospatial technology, wikis, excavation, new media, digital art, outreach, graffiti, and filmmaking.  I have worked in Texas, California, and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey.

Morigerowsky, Freya,

Morell-Hart, Shanti, (Archaeology, 2002) I am interested in foodways of the ancient Maya.  I employ paeloethnobotanical methodologies, practice theory approaches, and ethnographic and ethnohistoric analogy to explore daily life in the Northern Yucatan Peninsula.  My dissertation focuses primarily on data from the pre-Classic site of T'isil, Quintana Roo, Mexico.

Murrell, Mary, (2005, socio-cultural) Areas of research interest: the book; information; media; access to knowledge; material culture; digital technologies

Olson, Krisjon Rae, (Socio-cultural, 2000); Dissertation examines the role of young people in the aftermath of genocide. Areas of interest include: anthropology of violence, truth, humanitarianism, childhood, public policy. Guatemala, The Netherlands; Rwanda, Former Yugoslavia.

Ordóñez, J. Thomas, (Medical 2004) Latin America; immigration, asylum seekers in the US, refugees. Political anthropology, social suffering and structural violence.

Ortiz, Beverly, North American Indians, Ethnic Identity, Life History, Ethnobotany and Folklore. Current research projects include a study of the contemporary practice of California Indian Basketry, the ethnobotanical knowledge of a Karuk elder, and Ohlone cultural associations with Golden Gate National Recreation Area parklands.

Ouzman, Sven

Panich, Lee, (Archaeology, 2002) My research interests include the archaeology and history of Native Americans during the colonial period in western North America, the persistence and transformation of cultural landscapes, as well as collaborative and public archaeology.  My dissertation research centers on the colonial experiences of the indigenous peoples who lived and worked at Mission Santa Catalina in Baja California, Mexico

Papazoglou, Adelaide, (Socio-cultural, 2002) Linguistic anthropology; philosophy of language; linguistics proper; performance and performativity; gender and sexuality; queer theory; critical studies in medicine and psychiatry; science studies.

Park, Jee Hwan, is interested in examining diverse forms and mechanisms through which class identity is shaped and represented. Now I am working on the ways in which tracking may function to inculcate a sense of social position into middle school students in Japan.

Peacock, Ben, is a doctoral candidate in the joint medical anthropology doctoral program.  His research explores how scientific sexual and drug-use knowledge is produced about marginal urban populations.  For his dissertation research he explored this question by conducting ethnography with both homeless queer youth and behavioral HIV- and HEP-C risk researchers who study them and people like them.  His areas of specialization include urban anthropology, sexuality/queer theory, anthropology of violence and science and technology studies.

Piatt, Jeff, is interested in looking at music-making practices as a site of subject formation wherein the lines commonly drawn between the domains of ethics and aesthetics are troubled.  He works in the Arab Islamic world.

Plemons, Eric, The primary focus of my study is transsexualism as it is formulated as an object of cultural knowledge through etiology, identification, and lived practice. Through transsexualism and other gender deviances, my work explores various notions of the body and embodiment, temporality, medicalization and pharmaceuticals, critical theory and knowledge production, and something like phenomenology.

Pohlman, Betsy (Medical, 2002) My research investigates the world of Alzheimer's Disease through the lens of the connections often made between Alzheimer's Disease and Down Syndrome. I am interested in understanding the ethics and politics of caring and curing conditions associated with cognitive difference, disability, and decline.

Quinby, Alysoun

Ramsay, Amy E., (Archaeology, 1997) United States (California and the Northeast); Presidio of San Francisco; historical archaeology, urban archaeology, material culture, constructivist approaches to history, women and children in military history and history of the West; public education, outreach and interpretation; archaeology and education; popular culture, television.

Ran, Michal

Rawitscher, Peter, (Socio-cultural, 2001) The construction of indigenous identity and governmentality in Latin America, -Colombia is central to my work. During the fieldwork phase of my dissertation I am centering on linguistic anthropology, visual anthropology and indigenous politics to study community responses to armed violence as a series of linguistic strategies for reframing the grounds opon which meaning is constructed. Other interests include indigenous relationships to nature, urban anthropology and practices of violence in Colombia.

Rees, Tobias

Revak, Kelly

Reyes-Cortes, Beatriz, (Sociocultural, 2004) Latin America, Yucatán, México. Suicide and suicide prevention organizations and their relationship to cultural narratives of the exotic "indigenous". Religion, spirituality and its intersections with modernity and everyday life. Phenomenology and experiential frameworks. Death as critical lens; end of life as an arena of interaction and negotiation within, between and across modalities and forms of life and power.

Roddick, Andrew, (Archaeology, 2002) Andes/Bolivia, South American prehistory, social (practice) theory, Marxist archaeologies, "complex" societies, ethnohistory, ethnoarchaeology, sites of ritual, ceramic analysis, public/community archaeology and the politics of representation.

Rodriguez, Timothy

Roebuck, Chris, (Medical, 2000) My dissertation is entitled “Workin’ It:” Transgender Embodiment, Ethics, and the Labor of Life.  It explores the lives of transgender women in San Francisco, many of whom have emigrated from Southeast Asia and Central and South America.  My research considers the contemporary emergence of transgender subjectivities and public cultures within four overlapping domains of life: (1) day-to-day survival strategies; (2) transnational migration and citizenship; (3) kinship and affective relations of care; and (4) biomedical techniques of gendered embodiment.   I investigate how multiple human-making technologies – biomedicine, kinship, citizenship, race, and gender – produce historically situated and embodied subjects as well as constitute the means by which subjects cultivate themselves as ethical humans.

Roy, Arpita

Russell, Matthew A., (Archaeology, 2005) My primary research interests combine maritime (underwater) and terrestrial archaeology to address cross-cultural encounters and colonialism.

Sachedina, Amal

Sanchez-Allred, Alberto, Mexico; medical and moral debates on the use of coffee, the fate of national character after import substitution, the national culture-industry, writing as method, object, and livelihood, the magazine as globalized artifact, processes of selection, and judgments of quality.

Sanford, Jesse

Sangaramoorthy, Thurka, (Medical 2002) MPH, PhD candidate in the joint medical anthropology program, conducting research on the rationalities of risk in HIV/AIDS research and surveillance data, and the ways in which they interface with representations of community, identity, culture, and difference among minority and transnational populations in the US. Research interests include risk, race/ethnicity, politics of numbers/classifications, stratified biomedicalization, ethnography in clinical settings, public health, and science and technology studies.

Sasser, Jade, (Med Anthro, 2005) My research interests focus on development, political ecology, mining, HIV/AIDS and international public health programs. Specifically, I am concerned with the ways in which subjects are produced in the context of environment-focused development projects.

Sayre, Matthew, (Archaeology, 2001) My research explores the intersections of ecology, ritual, and agriculture at a pre-urban settlement near Chavin de Huantar.  In particular, I employ paleoethnobotanical research methods to address these issues.

Scherz, China, (Medical Anthropology, 2004) My research examines the negotiation of emergent ethical and moral dilemmas involved in the relationships between children, families, and institutions.  Through studies of Catholic's responses to unmarried motherhood in Ireland, the use of scientific form in the US Child Protective Services programs, and State and NGO efforts to implement the Convention of the Rights of the Child in Uganda I will describe several modes by which families relate to institutions and develop a framework for analyzing how individuals and institutions make complex ethical decisions.

Schneider, Tsim, is a PhD candidate with interests in the archaeology of Native California, colonial encounters, shellmounds, and photography.

Sedlacek, Abigail

Shahrokti, Sholeh, interested in culture of sexuality and theories of gender, Political economy of the body and sex work in Tehran, critical studies of the transformation of values, the configuration of the self in contemporary Iranian youth cultures [in comparison to other countries in the Middle East]. Organization of public space and self-management as part of the urban life in the Islamic Iran. Visual culture and the role of media in production of social norms, scientific knowledge and the role of the "specialists" in the production of modern subjects. Anthropology of modernity and history of modern thought.

Shever, Elana, is interested in the social relations among people and things, processes of economic transformation, questions of nature, and the politics of petroleum in the contemporary world. My dissertation analyzes how petroleum becomes an object around which a wide range of social relations are generated, organized, negotiated and contested within Argentine industrial capitalism. It examines how the neoliberal thought experiment in “privatization” was translated into concrete situated practices that not only reconfigured property ownership and the relations of production that comprised the national oil and gas companies, but transformed kinship, friendship, consumption, citizenship and the boundary between public-ness and private-ness. Tacking between a Patagonian oil town and the neighborhood surrounding the petrochemical plant on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, each chapter engages a particular problem of relationality among people, and between people and materials, in the Argentine oil fields and the anthropological theoretical fields. 2006 “Creating Bonds: Petroleum, Gifts and Debts” at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, San Jose, California.

Skafish, Peter

Smith, Cheryl A., (Archaeology, 2000) North America; historical archaeology, cultural contact, ethnicity, zooarchaeology.

Smith, Kalim H., I am interested in how academic authority is produced and reproduced in work involving indigenous communities, particularly in the language revitalization of Southwestern U.S./Mexico border area indigenous nations. My interests also include commodification of culture, language policy and multilingualism, and critical Native American studies.

Soluri, Liz, I am a Ph.D. candidate interested in California archaeology, prehistoric hunter-gatherer interactions, foodways, and paleoethnobotany.

Stalcup, Meg, The general areas of my interest and inquiry are: art, new media and communication; anthropological methodology, pedagogy and collaboration; and science, technology and epistemology. My dissertation fieldwork is with law enforcement groups on information and knowledge production, specifically the epistemology of intelligence gathering and analysis. I have worked in Latin America, most often Brazil, the United States and Europe.

Stavrianakis, Anthony

Stevenson, Rebecca

Stonington, Scott, is interested in the anthropology of ethics and end-of-life care.  My dissertation work is on the construction of new ethical systems to solve the problems of modern death in Thailand.

Stroud, Marsha, is interested in psychosexual development, particularly surrounding puberty.  She is also interested in topics related to trauma and mental illness.

Sumii , Kensuke, (Medical, 1998) Japan; Popular medical discourse, Modernity, Theory of Consumption.

Tanaka, Maki, (Socio-cultural, 2003) My thesis will focus on Tourism and UNESCO cultural heritage preservation in Trinidad, Cuba. I am particularly interested in the urban planning and spatial processes in uncertain times.

Tang, Joy, is interested in interncultural dance (specifically Salsa), identity and place, liminality, and folkloric performance.  Sub-interests include personal narrative/essay, and the intersection of literary and oral communication, especially as a parallel to cultural interaction.

Tung, Burcu, (Archaeology, 2002) I am interested in the prehistory of Western Asia, specifically on the nature of early sedentary societies. My dissertation research involves Çatalhöyük and the importance of the creation of a built environment in maintaining tradition, where I take a geoarchaeological approach to study the building materials. I am also interested in the historical development and politics of archaeology in Western Asia, and the creation of heritage sites.

Whitington, Jerome, (Socio-Cultural, 2000); Environment and development as problems of the global; uncertainty, practical reason and normativity in international organizations; hydropower development in mainland Southeast Asia. "Technopolitical Suspicion and the Pathos of Expertise: Neoliberal development in Lao hydropower," Submitted for publication to Anthropological Quarterly.

Wilcox, Emily, Working at the intersections of medical anthropology, performance theory, postcolonial theory, and science studies, she investigates the dance and performance art industries in post-Mao China as a site for thinking about how the processes of cultural efficacy and production of (aesthetic/economic/moral) value operate under conditions of drastic social transition. She is particularly interested in how the disciplined virtuosic subjects who come into being through China's institutions of dance education challenge modern assumptions about the relationships between mechanization and creativity, technology and art, constraint and self-realization.

Williams, Megan, Tourism; Latin America; the Amazon; effects of cultural and ecological tourism on indigenous communities; self-conscious indigenous cultural maintenance; tourism in post-war Guatemala

Zavarella, Edoardo

Zheng, Lisia, (socio-cultural, 2005) My research looks at practices of urban design and community planning in contemporary China. I'm also interested in how popular media and art impact these urban transformations.

Last updated June 5, 2008

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