School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 51-100 of 110 Results
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Tanya Marie Luhrmann
Albert Ray Lang Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsHer work focuses on the edge of experience: on voices, visions, the world of the supernatural and the world of psychosis. She has done ethnography on the streets of Chicago with homeless and psychotic women, and worked with people who hear voices in Chennai, Accra and the South Bay. She has also done fieldwork with evangelical Christians who seek to hear God speak back, with Zoroastrians who set out to create a more mystical faith, and with people who practice magic.
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Liisa Malkki
Professor of Anthropology, Emerita
BioLiisa H. Malkki is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research interests include: the politics of nationalism, internationalism, cosmopolitanism, and human rights discourses as transnational cultural forms; the social production of historical memory and the uses of history; political violence, exile, and displacement; the ethics and politics of humanitarian aid; child research; and visual culture. Her field research in Tanzania exlored the ways in which political violence and exile may produce transformations of historical consciousness and national identity among displaced people. This project resulted in Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (University of Chicago Press, 1995). In another project, Malkki explored how Hutu exiles from Burundi and Rwanda, who found asylum in Montreal, Canada, imagined scenarios of the future for themselves and their countries in the aftermath of genocide in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Malkki’s most recent book, Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork (with Allaine Cerwonka) was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007. Her most recent book-length project (based on fieldwork from 1995 to the present) examines the changing interrelationships among humanitarian interventions, internationalism, professionalism, affect, and neutrality in the work of the Finnish Red Cross in cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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Aaron Mascarenhas
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2023
GR Student Worker, AnthropologyBioI currently practice as a doctor and a medical anthropologist. I completed my MBBS (Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery) at Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, India. My experience as a medical practitioner strengthened my conviction that there was much that contemporary medical pedagogy did not teach its students about health, care, and healing. I spent the next few years as a student of the humanities. I obtained a Master's in Liberal Studies from Ashoka University, Sonipat, India, where I studied the relationship between the linguistic and ethical dimensions of medical eponyms named after perpetrators of the Holocaust. At Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, I completed an MA in Philosophy. My final project at Simon Fraser developed a framework to recognise oppression experienced by patients as they attempted to partake in knowledge production during their encounter with biomedical systems.
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Kristin McFadden
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019
BioKristin McFadden is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford and a JD Candidate at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law. Her research broadly focuses on the socio-legal mechanisms of dispossession and disenfranchisement in the American South. Her dissertation investigates the risk of Black land dispossession in the South Carolina Low Country with particular attention to heirs property as a multifaceted legal and political category. Kristin received her B.A. in Anthropology and African American Studies from Emory University, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, and received her M.A. in Anthropology from Stanford. Kristin has previously worked as a political organizer in rural regions of South Carolina and research analyst with the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs.
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Shikha Nehra
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019
South Asia Working Group Fellow, South Asian StudiesBioShikha Nehra is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University. She is conducting dissertation research on the emerging idioms and forms of political belonging in India's north-eastern state of Assam. Her ethnographic and archival research in Assam explores questions of political membership for Muslim communities through its sociocultural terrain, tracing the contribution of different ethnic and literary associations in claiming recognition as indigenous or legal citizens through complex registers of language, identity and belonging. Her broader fields of interest include nationalism, populism, state and sovereignty, bureaucracy, citizenship, subjectivity, and identity-formation.
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Venolia Rabodiba
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019
CGE Student Employee, Institute for Research in the Social SciencesCurrent Role at StanfordPh.D Candidate, Department of Anthropology
Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation Africa Fellow, Center for African Studies
Center for Global Ethnography student employee Institute for Research in the Social Sciences -
Elliott Reichardt
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI research the social production of optimism in global health projects through analyzing how the past is transformed into an actionable present.
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John Rick
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus
BioJohn Rick’s research focuses on prehistoric archaeology and anthropology of hunter-gatherers and initial hierarchical societies, stone tool analysis and digital methodologies, Latin America, Southwestern U.S. Rick’s major research efforts have included long-term projects studying early hunting societies of the high altitude puna grasslands of central Peru, and currently he directs a major research project at the monumental World Heritage site of Chavín de Huántar aimed at exploring the foundations of authority in the central Andes. Other field projects include work on early agricultural villages in the American Southwest, and a recently-initiated project on the Preclassic and Early Classic archaeology of the Guatemalan highlands near Panajachel, Atitlan. Current emphasis is on employing dimensional analytical digital techniques to the study of landscape and architecture, and on exploring the contexts and motivations for the development of sociopolitical inequalities.
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Jonathan Rosa
Associate Professor of Education and, by courtesy, of Linguistics, of Anthropology and of Comparative Literature
On Partial Leave from 01/01/2025 To 03/31/2025Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently working on two book projects through which I am continuing to develop frameworks for understanding ethnoracial, linguistic, and educational formations. The first examines racial reckonings across distinctive societal contexts by interweaving ethnographic analysis of diasporic Puerto Rican experiences and broader constructions of Latinidad that illustrate race and ethnicity as colonial and communicative predicaments. The second spotlights decolonial approaches to the creation of collective well-being through educational and societal transformations based on longstanding community collaborations in Chicago.
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Krish Seetah
Associate Professor of Environmental Social Sciences, of Oceans, of Anthropology and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment
BioI am a zooarchaeologist, whose focus is primarily on colonisation and colonialism. My zooarchaeological research has used butchery analysis (with the benefit of professional and ethnographic actualistic experience) to investigate agency within the human-animal relationship. More recently, I have employed geometric morphometrics (GMM) as a mechanism for identifying and distinguishing animal populations. This approach to studying colonial activity centres on understanding how people manipulate animal bodies, both during life and after death.
Alongside the strictly faunal research is a research interest in technologies associated with animal processing. This has been used to investigate issues of technology, trade and socio-economic attitudes within colonial contexts in the Mediterranean (Venice & Montenegro) and the Baltic (Poland, Latvia & Lithuania).
I am also the Director of the ‘Mauritian Archaeology and Cultural Heritage’ (MACH) project, which studies European Imperialism and colonial activity. This project centres on the movement of peoples and material cultures, specifically within the contexts of slavery and Diaspora. The work of this project has focused on key sites in Mauritius and is based on a systematic programme of excavation and environmental sampling. The underlying aims are to better understand the transition from slavery to indentured labour following abolition, the extent and diversity of trade in the region and the environmental consequences of intense, monoculture, agriculture. -
Kabir Tambar
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioKabir Tambar has been conducting ethnographic and historical research in Turkey since 2003, primarily focused on the critical study of secularism and semiotic approaches in anthropology. His work centers on questions of temporality in political modernity, or the narrative threads that bind our sense of the present to both an inherited past and an anticipated future.
Tambar’s first book, The Reckoning of Pluralism (Stanford, 2014), explored how Alevis in central Anatolia encounter and interrogate the promises of secular modernity. The book offered a critical study of how state authorities (along with academics, journalists, and intellectuals) seek to define and discipline the parameters of religious difference, such that ostensibly epistemological questions about the writing of history have come to shape governing imperatives to regiment public enactments of Alevi religion. The book is also especially interested to reveal how Alevi engagements with Islamic tradition, including in practices of ritual mourning, enable alternative ways of narrating the religious past and its inheritance in the present.
After completing this research project, Tambar began to study inter-communal expressions of solidarity. Initially, the work developed in response to the massive, country-wide Gezi Park protests, with particular attention to the tensions and misunderstandings that accompany the emergence of new political friendships. From this starting point, Tambar began a decade-long inquiry into the history of irresolute and foiled friendships that have unsteadied the politics of the nation-state for over a century. He is now completing a new book manuscript, tentatively titled After Friendship: An Ottoman History of Disaffection, that examines the erosion of friendship as a credible discourse of late Ottoman and Turkish republican politics in the past century. Rather than redeem friendship as a normative ground for understanding political possibilities today, the book excavates the failing of friendship as a historical problem, asking how social actors — especially Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds — have grappled with the attenuation of solidarity and the estrangement of political identification. -
Sharika Thiranagama
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioSharika Thiranagama's work has consistently explored how political mobilization and domestic life intersect, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. This work and broader comparative theorization rests on understanding how people actually live together, often in highly fractious and unequal ways, situating these processes in specific historical formations of vernacular “privates” and “publics” in South Asia.
Her work is based in Sri Lanka and in Kerala, South India. In Sri Lanka, her primary research (In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka 2011) was on civil war, political violence, home, displacement, militarization, family particularly intergenerational and gendered relations in wartime and post war life. This work takes these themes through the lives of Sri Lankan Tamil and Sri Lankan Muslim minorities. Other work includes the history of railways, the BBC world service, masculinity, leadership and popular militancy, etc.
Her work in Kerala focuses on the long-lasting legacy on enslavement and caste in the lives on contemporary agricultural Dalit laboring families, examining caste, gender, household economies, house and neighborhood spaces through their inheritance and future affordances. Articles examine the house, public and private in India, inheritance as inequality, and caste and neighborliness.
Her future work will take an examination of inheritance, caste and family back to Sri Lanka for new fieldwork in Jaffna with Tamils and Muslims after Sri Lanka’s recent economic collapse and postwar caste conflicts. -
Mudit Trivedi
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioMudit Trivedi is an archaeologist with interests in religious subjectivity, materiality, craft and historical anthropology.
His first book project, An Archaeology of Virtue, considers the archaeology of conversion to Islam through the results of an ongoing long-term archaeological project he has co-directed at the site of Indor in Rajasthan, North India. This research bridges archaeological and anthropological conceptualizations of tradition. It considers the thematizations of ethical relations, hierarchies and gendered pious praxis in material media. It brings together analyses of architectural, spatial and artifactual datasets combined with compositional elemental analyses. The project’s wider goals are to rethink the secular modern commitments of archaeology and the nature of the archaeological trace.
Mudit is also interested in developing critiques of archaeology’s disciplinary commitments to liberal values and legal infrastructures. A first paper from this project critically re-situates colonial Treasure Trove laws that framed the archaeological common good around the taking of finds from others. This second project reconsiders archaeological praxis and the discipline’s recourse to property law in a series of South Asian contexts ranging from accidental finds to disputes centred on waqfs.
His forthcoming publications relate to these combined interests. They cover archaeometric insights into social contexts of glass artifact production and use in South Asian and other contexts; the long-term settlement history of the region of Mewat in North India, and theoretical problems in the historical and archaeological study of religion and conversion. He has co-edited a special issue of the Medieval History Journal on ‘Archaeologies of the Medieval in South Asia’.
