School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 51-100 of 118 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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Stefania Manfio
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2018
BioI am a maritime archaeologist and current Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology. I specialize in the use of 3D visualizations, based on gaming technology, as a tool for the enhancement and dissemination of maritime heritage. My research explores how the social, craft, and biographical aspects of shipbuilding and the transportation of people can help us better understand the period of slavery and the transition to indenture. Moreover, I am broadly interested in understanding how the ‘vessel,’ the ship itself, is a vehicle of culture contact and how the study of the artifacts found in the shipwreck can give us information on life at sea and the relationships on-board. For my Ph.D., I am working on materials and shipwrecks from Mauritius, serving as an ideal case for Indian Ocean labor movements.
I am also involved in developing the Marine Spatial Plan for Mauritius, developing ways to integrate maritime heritage into the Blue Economy mandate and contribute to resilience in Small Island Developing States.
I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at the University of Ca’ Foscari, Venice. During my training in marine and underwater archaeology, I had the opportunity to participate in numerous underwater excavations in Veneto, Sicily, Puglia, Calabria, and Croatia. -
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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Richard McGrail
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2010
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsEthnographic research describes the daily lives of children in California's foster care system who live in therapeutic residential group homes. Research questions how relationships of trust and attachement are formed between children and their adult caregivers, as well as among the children themselves.
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Shikha Nehra
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2019
BioShikha 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 through its sociocultural terrain, tracing the contribution of different ethnic and literary associations in claiming recognition as indigenous communities 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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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
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently working on two book projects through which I am continuing to develop insights into ethnoracial, linguistic, and educational formations. The first offers frameworks for understanding ethnoracial contradictions 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 at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, 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
On Leave from 10/01/2023 To 06/30/2024BioKabir Tambar is a sociocultural anthropologist, working at the intersections of politics, language, and religion. He is broadly interested in the politics of history, performances of public criticism, and varieties of Islamic practice in Turkey.
Tambar’s first book is a study of the politics of pluralism in contemporary Turkey, focusing on the ways that Alevi religious history is staged for public display. More generally, the book investigates how secular states govern religious differences through practices of cultural and aesthetic regulation. Tambar is currently working on a new project that examines the historical imagination in contexts of political closure, both at the end of the Ottoman empire and during periods of emergency rule in the era of the nation-state. -
Sharika Thiranagama
Associate Professor of Anthropology
BioSharika Thiranagama’s research has focused on various aspects of the Sri Lankan civil war. Primarily, she has conducted research with two different ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims. Her research explores changing forms of ethnicisation, the effects of protracted civil war on ideas of home in the midst of profound displacement and the transformations in and relationships between the political and the familial in the midst of political repression and militarization. She has also conducted other research on the history of railways in Sri Lanka, on the political culture of treason amongst Sri Lankan Tamils, the BBC World service in South Asia etc. She is currently undertaking new research in Sri Lanka on post war life in the Jaffna Peninsula mapping new post war social configurations. The second fieldwork project that she is conducting fieldwork on currently is entitled " The Local Level Social Life of Global Ideologies" and will be based in Kerala, South India. It is based in the Palakkad district of Kerala and will examine three generations of transformation among agricultural workers and the rural library movement."