School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-20 of 117 Results

  • Noor Amr

    Noor Amr

    Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019

    BioNoor Amr is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. She is conducting dissertation research alongside the church asylum (Kirchenasyl) movement in Germany, paying attention to the relationship between religion, race/ethnicity, migration, sovereignty, and political belonging. Her ethnographic research explores how Christian sanctuary, a form of shelter from the state, becomes a means through which rejected asylum-seekers gain legibility as subjects worthy of legal recognition. Her broader theoretical interests include political theology, psychoanalysis, histories of sanctuary/confinement, and the coloniality of asylum.

  • Paras Arora

    Paras Arora

    Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2021

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSocio-Cultural Anthropology, Medical Anthropology, Psychological Anthropology, Ethnography, Care, Cognitive Disability, Autism, Gender, Family, Kinship, Ethics, Occupational Therapy, Neurodiversity, Voice, Intuition, Emotions, Everyday Life, & South Asia

  • Andrew Bauer

    Andrew Bauer

    Associate Professor of Anthropology

    BioAndrew Bauer is an anthropological archaeologist whose research and teaching interests broadly focus on the archaeology of human-environment relations, including the socio-politics of land use and both symbolic and material aspects of producing spaces, places, and landscapes. Andrew's primary research is based in South India, where he co-directs fieldwork investigating the relationships between landscape history, cultural practices, and institutionalized forms of social inequalities and difference during the region’s Neolithic, Iron Age, Early Historic, and Medieval periods. As an extension of his archaeological work he is also interested in the intersections of landscape histories and modern framings of nature that relate to conservation politics and climate change.

  • Miray Cakiroglu

    Miray Cakiroglu

    Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2018

    BioMiray Cakiroglu is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Anthropology, Stanford University. She is currently conducting fieldwork on non-Muslim property in Turkey, with particular attention to the current figurations of the temporality of transition from the empire to the nation-state and the more-than-legal sociopolitical domain that infiltrates past and present articulations of ownership. Miray has focused on the scene of acquisition, use, confiscation, claim, and return involving non-Muslim property, specifically those owned by Rum foundations in contemporary Istanbul. Following the major earthquakes of 2023 in southern Turkey, Miray has extended her focus to understanding how property relations might be articulated in stark ways with loss, especially for the Arabic-speaking Christian Orthodox community in the Antakya region.

    Miray has two poetry books published in Turkey. She also translated Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings into Turkish. Most recently, she collaborated with ten other women poets in a volume of documentary poetry.

    Miray holds an M.A. degree in Near Eastern Studies from the Hagop Kevorkian Center at New York University and Critical and Cultural Studies from Bogazici University, Turkey. She received her B.A. from Bogazici University, Department of Western Languages and Literatures, with a double major in Philosophy.

  • Hector Miguel Callejas

    Hector Miguel Callejas

    Lecturer

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCallejas' current project examines the commemoration of Indigenous peoples in El Salvador. During the 2010s, Salvadoran governments established a neoliberal regime of multicultural state recognition of "pueblos Indígenas" within the Salvadoran nation. Indigenous organizations, state institutions, and ordinary citizens organized public ceremonies, parades, and festivals that articulated discourses of Indigenous existence, belonging, and resistance within local and national communities and racialized some community members as Indigenous. These commemorative practices challenged the state’s historical disavowal of race and racism through the logic of mestizaje, or racial mixture. They revealed entrenched structures of settler colonialism and White supremacy. The practices also exposed limited political possibilities for Indigenous subject formation to decolonize state and society. This project shows how the cultural politics of Indigeneity and memory remake the state categorization and governance of nation, citizenship, and race. It draws on ethnographic research in the capital city of San Salvador and the neighboring municipalities of Izalco and Nahuizalco in the western highlands. Callejas entered these distinct social worlds through the Red Nacional de Pueblos Indígenas "El Jaguar Sonriente," an influential activist network in the Salvadoran Indigenous movement. He accessed the network through the Consejo de Pueblos Originarios Náhuat Pipil de Nahuizalco, a grassroots Indigenous organization. In addition to developing a book proposal, he is writing related articles on the following topics for scholarly journals: 1) Indigenous heritage tourism, 2) testimonios of Indigenous genocide, 3) international Indigenism, 4) collaborative research with Indigenous communities, and 5) sacred site protection.

    His next project will examine the securitization of the environment in El Salvador. In recent years, the Bukele government has responded to endemic gang violence throughout the national territory with the suspension of due process rights and the mass imprisonment of alleged gang members. This ongoing régimen de excepción, or state of exception, has received popular support on public safety and criticism for authoritarianism. Employing ethnographic methods, Callejas will explore the roles of race and Indigeneity in the production of safe space under this new governmental regime, and the effects of this process on how ordinary people perceive and interact with their environments. The project will focus on Indigenous peoples, citizens, diaspora, and tourists.

  • William Durham

    William Durham

    Bing Professor in Human Biology, Emeritus

    BioWilliam (Bill) Durham is Bing Professor in Human Biology (Emeritus), Bass University Fellow in Undergraduate Education, and a Senior Fellow (Emeritus) in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford. He has been jointly appointed in Human Biology and Anthropology at Stanford since 1977, when he came from the Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. Bill was an undergraduate Biology major at Stanford, Class of 1971, and received the Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel Award at graduation for his contribution to undergraduate education via the NSF-funded Student Air Pollution Research Project, the first student initiative nationally to receive NSF funding.

    Bill’s career has focused on two main themes: (1) putting principles of evolution to work in efforts to sustain the biological and cultural diversity of our world; and (2) identifying social dimensions of environmental problems in Latin America and working with local leaders to help solve them. He has carried out fieldwork in Peru, Brazil, and Ecuador (especially Galápagos) in South America, and in El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica in Central America. In 1983, he was one of the first scholars to receive the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and has also received five five awards for research and teaching at Stanford, including one by vote of the students. Bill’s recent book, Exuberant Life: An Evolutionary Approach to Conservation in Galápagos (Oxford University Press, 2021) was named a Finalist for the 2022 PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers.

    Bill’s other publications include the books Scarcity and Survival in Central America (Stanford Press 1979; and in Spanish, by UCA Editores 1988), Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity (Stanford Press, 1991), The Social Causes of Environmental Destruction in Latin America (U. of Michigan Press, 1995, with M. Painter), Inbreeding, Incest and the Incest Taboo (Stanford Press 2004, with A. Wolf), and Ecotourism and Conservation in the Americas (CABI, 2008, with A. Stronza). In addition, he served as Editor in Chief for 16 volumes of the Annual Review of Anthropology between 1992 and 2008.

    Bill was Founding Co-Director of the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), a research organization that views tourism as a means to promote local livelihoods and environmental conservation. Along with Stanford Professors Rodolfo Dirzo and Larry Crowder, Bill has been Co-director of the Osa-Golfito Initiative (INOGO) in the Woods Institute, working with Costa Ricans to develop a sustainability strategy for the southern region of the country.

    He has led more than 35 Stanford Alumni Association trips to Galápagos, Costa Rica, the Amazon, East Africa, and elsewhere.

  • Paulla Ebron

    Paulla Ebron

    Associate Professor of Anthropology

    BioPaulla Ebron joined the department in 1992. Ebron is the author of Performing Africa, a work based on her research in The Gambia that traces the significance of West African praise-singers in transnational encounters. A second project focuses on tropicality and regionalism as it ties West Africa and the U.S. Georgia Sea Islands in a dialogue about landscape, memory and political uplift. This project is entitled, "Making Tropical Africa in the Georgia Sea Islands."