Liza Bakewell
Assistant Professor of Research:
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Phone: +1 401 863 2106
Phone 2: +1 207 831 2729
LizaBakewell@Brown.EDU
Ph.D. Brown 1991
Brown University Research Profile Page for Liza Bakewell
Bakewell's research interests are in Women's Studies, Spanish Language and Latin American Cultures, Linguistic Anthropology, Aesthetics and Material Culture, Gender, Women's Studies, Pictorial Writing of Mesoamerica, Indigenous Rights; Cyber-Education; Creative Non-Fiction.
Interests
The Mesolore Project ---www.mesolore.net--- centers on the research and pedagogy of Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts and attempts to bridge these manuscripts to contemporary contexts. In 2001 this research resulted in a CD ROM, Mesolore: Exploring Mesoamerican Culture, with a dissemination effort that followed for five years. In 2013, Mesolore resulted in Mesolore: The Cyber Center for Scholars, Teachers and Students of Mesoamerica located @ www.mesolore.org. Mesolore's Cyber Center offers rich, interactive, primary source documents for scholarly research and interactive teaching.
The linguistic project, MADRE, explores within a creative non-fiction genre the ins and outs of the Spanish language as spoken in South and North America, with a zoomed-in focus on Mexican Spanish. This project culminated in 2011 with the publication of Madre: Perilous Journeys of a Spanish Noun, published by W. W. Norton, New York. It was a finalist for the New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards in 2012 and it has been reviewed extensively. Excerpts have been published in online, international literary magazines (e.g., http://www.wordswithoutborders.org). Madre provides insights into culture's relationship to language and language's relationship to nation, history, gender and individual psychologies.
Teaching
Linguistics: Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Women Speak: Introduction to a Gendered Linguistic Anthropology (Colgate University)
Gender: Introduction to Feminist Anthropology; Gender and the Latin Diaspora; Gender and the Church in the Latin Diaspora; Introduction to Gender and Anthropology; Gender, Ethnicity and Art
Art: Material Culture, Material Matters: The Anthropology of Gender and Things (Colgate University); Art and Anthropology: The Ethnography of Things in Secular and Religious Life (Bowdoin); Frida and Diego: The Semiotics of Nationalism and Representation; Case Studies in Painting from around the World (Vietnam, Senegal, Australia, Latin America); Gender, Ethnicity and Art
Religion: The Anthropology of Religion