Stanford University
Showing 21-40 of 92 Results
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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."
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Ayana Omilade Flewellen
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioAyana Omilade Flewellen (they/she) is a Black Feminist, an archaeologist, an artist scholar, and a storyteller. As a scholar of anthropology and African and African Diaspora Studies, Flewellen's intellectual genealogy is shaped by critical theory rooted in Black feminist epistemology and pedagogy. This epistemological backdrop not only constructs the way they design, conduct, and produce their scholarship but acts as foundational to how she advocates for greater diversity within the field of archaeology and within the broader scope of academia. Flewellen is the co-founder and current Board Chair of the Society of Black Archaeologists and sits on the Board of Diving With A Purpose. In July 2022, they joined the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University as an Assistant Professor. Her research and teaching interests address Black Feminist Theory, historical archaeology, memory, maritime heritage conservation, public and community-engaged archaeology, processes of identity formations, and representations of slavery and its afterlives. Flewellen has been featured in National Geographic, Science Magazine, PBS, and CNN; and regularly presents her work at institutions including The National Museum for Women in the Arts.
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Duana Fullwiley
Professor of Anthropology
BioI am an anthropologist of science, medicine and well-being interested in how social identities, health outcomes and scientific narratives intersect. In my first book, The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, 2011), I draw on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the US, France and Senegal. By bringing the lives of people with sickle cell anemia together with how the science about them has been made, The Enculturated Gene weaves together postcolonial genetic science, the effects of structural adjustment on health resources, and patient activism between Senegal and France to show how African sickle cell has been ordered in ethnic-national terms at the level of the gene. The Enculturated Gene won the Royal Anthropological Institute’s 2011 Amaury Talbot Prize for the most valuable work of African Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association’s 2014 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology.
Beginning in 2003, I conducted multi-sited field research in the United States on emergent technologies that measure human genetic diversity among populations and between individuals. As an outgrowth of this research, I became particularly interested in how scientists engage ideas of genetic "inclusion" in how they enlist participant involvement in specific disease research problems, and how they also grapple with social movements, historical reckoning, data privacy and racial capital. My second book, Tabula Raza: Mapping Race and Human Diversity in American Genome Science (UC Press, 2024), explores these issues in light of how U.S. political concepts of “race” function in genetic recruitment protocols and study designs on complex disease, “tailored medicine,” ancestry tracing, and personal genomics. Tabula Raza won the 2024 Diana Forsythe Prize granted by the Committee for the Anthropology of Science, Technology & Computing of the American Anthropological Association. It also won the 2024 C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.
As of 2019, I have begun to interrogate inequities in human migration and mobility--focusing on the forces that push people to leave West Africa for the complicated pull of Europe. I am concerned with people's personal narratives of risk and success at all costs in light of state sponsored surveillance, the simultaneous rigidity and fluidity of borders (land and sea) marked by new technologies, as well as how people draw from and create various forms of science and knowledge to forge relational trajectories that come to constitute home. This work also considers how human-made environmental resource scarcity figures into decisions to migrate (or, rather, to simply move) in their quests for viable futures, stability, and health. The project furthermore investigates new forms of racialization engendered by contemporary iterations of technologically-assisted and animated border patrolling, while the ocean itself is being reconceptualized as a new frontier for salvatory tech options and economic growth in Africa and elsewhere.
My research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew and Florence White Fellows program in Medicine and the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I have also been an invited scholar at the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation in Paris (1997-1998, 2000 and 2002), a USIA Fulbright Scholar to Senegal, a fellow at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2004-2005), and a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health (2005-2007). My work was also selected for a Scholars Award by NSF's Science & Society Program, co-sponsored by the Directorate of Biology, from 2008-2012. -
Angela Garcia
Roger and Cynthia Lang Professor of Environmental Anthropology
BioResearch Area(s)
Culture and Society
Environmental Anthropology
Gender and Sexuality
Medical Anthropology
Political Anthropology and Political Economy
Race, Ethnicity, and Collective Identity
Materiality
Field of Interest(s)
Violence
Addiction
Kinship
Care
Environment
Landscape
Writing
Professor Garcia works at the intersection of violence, care, and form, asking how suffering is both endured and narrated, and what is at stake, ethically and politically, in the telling. Her research focuses on the intimate lives of the dispossessed and on the attachments, affects, and daily practices through which they work to hold their worlds together against forces designed to break them apart. Increasingly, her work has turned toward the ways ecological transformation, dispossession, and the built and unbuilt environment shape ethical and social life. Garcia is also attentive to narrative form as a means of apprehending historical and lived experience.
Garcia's most recent book, The Way That Leads Among the Lost: Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City's Anexos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), takes readers inside Mexico City's anexos — informal, coercive rehabilitation clinics where the working poor treat drug addiction, and where violence itself is folded into the work of healing. Widely condemned as abusive, illegal, and unethical, anexos are nonetheless the primary resource for addiction treatment among Mexico's poor, spreading now across the United States as well. Garcia sets these spaces within the larger history and social fabric that produced them, showing how families turn to anexos not despite the violence of the drug war but because of it — as one of the only shelters available against a catastrophe that is at once historical, structural, and ongoing.
Garcia's first book, The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession Along The Rio Grande (University of California Press, 2010), traced intergenerational heroin use among Hispanos in northern New Mexico back to a longer history of colonial dispossession — arguing that addiction there is less a private affliction than a collective, historically produced longing for connection and release.
Garcia's current projects extend this attention to land and its histories. The first project is a narrative nonfiction book titled The Devil's Backbone, which turns to Santa Rita del Cobre and the Chino Mine district near Silver City, New Mexico — a landscape scarred by conquest, extraction, and ecological ruin. Drawing on Garcia's own family history alongside ethnographic and archival research, the book brings back to life a racially segregated company town that was erased as the mine expanded. Moving from present to past, surface to subsurface, the book traces four generations of labor and loss experienced by Mexican and Mexican-American miners, unearthing new ways of thinking about environmental, social, and family history. It also reveals the difficult necessity of remaining resilient amid ongoing environmental and existential catastrophe.
The second project examines Mexico City's desagüe — the vast drainage project Spanish colonists began carving into the Valley of Mexico in the seventeenth century, and which continues, centuries later, to reshape the city's water, bodies, and disease. Still incomplete and still consequential, the desagüe becomes a lens onto some of the most urgent questions of our moment: water scarcity, the human entanglement with changing ecologies, and the slow violence of chronic illness. Garcia asks how this centuries-old engineering project continues to remake neighborhoods, bodies, and social worlds from underground up.
Garcia’s work has received major awards in anthropology and writing. She is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow. -
M. Elizabeth Grávalos
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
BioDr. Grávalos is an anthropological archaeologist that studies Indigenous Andean communities in the deep past, for whom we have no written records. She looks at Andean ways of making things—like ceramics, textiles, and cordage—to understand the sociopolitics that undergirded these making practices, including engagements with specific substances and landscapes. With theoretical foci on materiality, ontology, and social practice, this research asks: what are the political affordances of specific materials? How did materials bridge possibilities for political action? How did people’s engagements with specific landscapes and materials impact power dynamics, economies, and social identities? To think through these questions, her work bridges humanities and science perspectives, blending insights from anthropological theory and cultural geography with material science techniques.
Dr. Grávalos’s research is based in the Ancash Region of northern Peru, where her ongoing investigation into political geologies considers how geologic resources are culturally made and valued, and how categorizations and use of these geomaterials foment political dynamics among pre-Hispanic and present-day Andean communities.
Dr. Grávalos is trained as a field archaeologist and materials analysis specialist. Since 2009, she has participated in and directed research projects in Peru, the Bahamas, and the city of Chicago (USA). She is committed to collaboration with descendant communities and centers community-based methodologies in her research. Dr. Grávalos is also an expert in ceramic compositional analysis (LA-ICP-MS and thin section petrography) as well as textile analysis. -
Thomas Hansen
Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsAnthropology of political life, ethno-religious identities, violence and urban life in South Asia and Southern Africa. Multiple theoretical and disciplinary interests from political theory and continental philosophy to psychoanalysis, comparative religion and contemporary urbanism
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Rachael Healy
Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2021
AY27 GSO rep, AnthropologyCurrent Research and Scholarly InterestsResearch interests: youth, working-class life, colonialism, urban landscapes, intergenerational trauma, (contentious) commemoration, collective memory, time and space/place-making, narrative and storytelling, borderlands, post-conflict space, Northern Ireland/Ireland, political identity, precarity, hope(lessness).
Broadly, my PhD research focuses on youth culture and teenage life in post-conflict Belfast. I am interested in discourses of intergenerational trauma and community spaces and how these are seen as points of relation in a larger communal making-sense of a growing youth mental health crisis in a West Belfast neighbourhood. My research contributed to new understandings about how vernaculars of political violence shift according to new and ever-expanding pressures and priorities in community life and cultural cultivation.
Prior to joining Stanford, I received a first-class honors degree in Global Health and Social Medicine from King’s College London. I also received a Master of Arts in Anthropology and Sociology from the Graduate Institute Geneva. Before attending university, I worked for four years in various health advocacy and youth work roles, including in South Africa and Scotland. -
Ian Hodder
Dunlevie Family Professor, Emeritus
BioIan Hodder joined the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology in September of 1999. Among his publications are: Symbols in Action (Cambridge 1982), Reading the Past (Cambridge 1986), The Domestication of Europe (Oxford 1990), The Archaeological Process (Oxford 1999). Catalhoyuk: The Leopard's Tale (Thames and Hudson 2006), and Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (Wiley and Blackwell, 2012). Professor Hodder has been conducting the excavation of the 9,000 year-old Neolithic site of Catalhoyuk in central Turkey since 1993. The 25-year project has three aims - to place the art from the site in its full environmental, economic and social context, to conserve the paintings, plasters and mud walls, and to present the site to the public. The project is also associated with attempts to develop reflexive methods in archaeology. Dr. Hodder is currently the Dunlevie Family Professor Emeritus.
