Faculty News
2009-10
Daniel Smith receives Hewlett Foundation Grant
Lina Fruzzetti latest film "Songs of a Sorrowful Man"
Matthew Gutmann, appointed Vice President for International Affairs
Douglas Anderson and Wanni Anderson awarded NSF Grant
The Anthropology Department welcomes Bianca Dahl as Postdoctoral Fellow in Anthropology and Population Studies
Bianca received her PhD at University of Chicago. Her research explores how international humanitarian agendas and interventions affect individual subjectivity, patterns of sociality, and processes of social reproduction among the recipients of global aid. She is writing a book based on her dissertation research (“Left Behind? Orphaned Children, Humanitarian Aid and the Politics of Kinship, Culture, and Caregiving during Botswana’s AIDS Crisis”), an ethnographic study of Western charities aiming to provide “culturally sensitive” support to orphans and their kin in the wake of Botswana’s AIDS epidemic. Focusing on the politically charged spaces forged at the interstices between foreign and local childrearing ideologies, Bianca’s work demonstrates how these orphans have emerged as symbols of demographic upheaval, as well as skilled political actors in their own right.
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2008-09
Paja Faudree receives $15,000 Career Development Award
Dr. Faudree will organize and host two interrelated initiatives: a seminar series featuring extended visits by very prominent senior figures in the field of linguistic anthropology and a day-long symposium featuring both senior colleagues and junior women in the field who would benefit from mentoring opportunities. These proposed alliances represent an innovation in linguistic anthropology studies, which has been relatively slow to move in the direction of cross-disciplinary, collaborative research models. |
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Matthew Gutmann, named new Director of Center for Latin American and Carribean Studies
Paja Faudree and Jessaca Leinaweaver receive 2009 Salomon grants
Stephen Houston and Thomas Garrison awarded NSF grant for project entitled "Landscape Succession in Lowland Maya Archaeology".
Matthew Gutmann wins AAA 2008 Eileen Basker Memorial Award for his book "Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico". For more information click here.
Daniel Smith wins Margaret Mead Award for his book "A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria"
Stephen Houston named 2008 MacArthur Fellow
News
Brown Anthropology is off to an exciting start for the 2008-09 academic year. We are thrilled to announce the appointment of two new Assistant Professors, Drs. Sherine Hamdy and Jessaca Leinaweaver, who bring huge talent and impressive experience to our program.
Dr. Hamdy, who had been a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Brown from 2006-08, is an authority on science, medicine, and medical ethics in the Islamic world and has done path-breaking field research on the interpenetrations of Islamic authority and contemporary biomedical authority over the ethical nature of the practice of organ transplantation in the contemporary Egyptian nation-state. She has a major book under contract with the University of California Press to be entitled “Our Bodies Belong to God: Islam and Bioethics in Egypt.” Next on her horizon is a new comparative field research project in which she will address prenatal genetic screening programs as they currently exist in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Dr. Hamdy was named to Brown’s distinguished Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professorship of the Social Sciences and International Affairs.
Dr. Leinaweaver, who had been an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba, is interested in a topic of global significance, the relocation of children through mechanisms such as visiting, migration, adoption, fosterage, apprenticeships, and domestic service. She has completed over two years of field research on these topics in the Peruvian Andes and has a major book in production with the Duke University Press to be entitled "The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru." She has begun two new research initiatives, one on how transnational labor migration transforms migrants' social responsibilities toward aging family members who are left behind, and another on two groups of young Peruvians who have moved to Spain: the children of economic migrants, and those who were adopted as children into Spanish families. Dr. Leinaweaver, while in the Department of Anthropology, will also strengthen the research and teaching missions of Brown's vibrant Population Studies and Training Center.
We have seen the future in the work of these two outstanding scholars and are delighted that the future is here in Brown’s Department of Anthropology.
We are pleased to announce that Dr. Sarah Chase who recently received her Ph.D. in our graduate program and who teaches Anthropology at the Pomfret School is teaching Anthropology 0200 Culture and Behavior this semester. Dr. Chase’s compelling book, Perfectly Prep: Gender Extremes at a New England Prep School was just published by Oxford University Press.
For additional background on Professor Hamdy, see Today at Brown at http://today.brown.edu/faculty/2008/hamdy
For additional background on Professor Leinaweaver, see Today at Brown at http://today.brown.edu/faculty/2008/leinaweaver