Stanford University


Showing 31-40 of 92 Results

  • M. Elizabeth Grávalos

    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

    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

  • Rachael Healy

    Rachael Healy

    Ph.D. Student in Anthropology, admitted Autumn 2021
    AY27 GSO rep, Anthropology

    Current 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

    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.