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Meet
the Professors
Geoffrey
Burkhart
Publications
My
central research interests are in India (and South Asian countries
more generally) and in its global diasporic populations. My early
fieldwork in India focused on caste, domestic organization, descent,
marriage, ritual and local-level politics in rural areas (particularly
in Tamil Nadu). I centered later research on a South Indian Protestant
congregation, with interests in family histories and in Christians
as a minority within the religiously plural setting of a small urban
center. I am now conducting ongoing research among gay South Asians
living in the U.S. and Canada, with emphases on identity, stereotyping,
discrimination and racism and community activism in North America.
I regularly
teach introductory undergraduate courses, including a course on
the ethnography of India. I have introduced recently a course on
the South Asian diaspora, with upper-level undergraduate and graduate
students, which focuses both on local communities and their transnational
ties. My graduate-level teaching centers on interests - in addition
to India - in identity, individualism, minority statuses (low caste
identities, sexual orientation, etc.) and social relations generally.
Richard J. Dent
Publications
Research
I
am an archaeologist. My geographic focus is the archaeology of North America,
specifically the Middle Atlantic region. Much of my early research concerned Paleoindian
studies with regard to matters of adaptation, paleoecological, and landscape reconstruction.
More recently I have focused on both the prehistory and history of the Chesapeake
Bay area. My most recent large-scale excavations were on 18th- and early 19th-century
sites in Philadelphia. The theoretical perspective that has guided all these investigations
tends to be more pragmatic than ideological. I believe that archaeology is best
served when we approach the past with a wide spectrum of ideas. Issues of meaning
and choice can coexist with notions of human adaptation and culture history. From
a methodological standpoint I am especially interested in the practice of field
archaeology. In that regard I am particularly interested in the application of
large- and medium-format photography in excavation settings as well as computer-aided
collection and analysis of data. I have a great deal of experience and interest
in cultural resources management and issues of cultural heritage. The majority
of my current writing focuses on the prehistoric and historic archaeology of the
Chesapeake region and the archaeology of Colonial and Federal Philadelphia. I
put a great deal of effort into teaching and offer a wide variety of undergraduate
and graduate courses. The common denominator in all these classes is a desire
to help students gain a personal perspective on what has been accomplished within
any particular area of study and to help them see where new ideas are emerging.
I believe that an environment where old notions can grate against new ideas is
most conducive to learning. I also believe that students need the space and freedom
to explore personal interests and ideas. In my experience, independent research,
exploration, dialogue, and hands-on experience are key elements toward that end.
Joan Gero
Publications
I focus
my research on gender and power issues in prehistory, especially
in the Andean regions of Argentina and Peru. After directing excavations
in New England, South Carolina and Labrador, I researched the early
administrative center of Queyash Alto in Peru during the 1980s,
while my current project (since 1992) in the Argentinean Andes involves
Early Formative household economies. I write about the origins of
state level society, feminist interpretations of prehistory and
the socio-politics of doing archaeology; my publications include
the popular book Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory,
edited with Margaret Conkey. I have served on many national archaeological
and anthropological committees, and I am senior North American representative
to the World Archaeological Congress.
I completed my role as Academic Secretary of the Fifth
World Archaeological Congress where 1200 participants from 77
countries convened to address issues of current interest in the
global politics of archaeology. View
pictures.
Lesley Gill
Publications
My research
in Latin America focuses political violence, human rights, global
economic restructuring, the state, and transformations in class,
gender, and ethnic relations. My books include: Precarious Dependencies:
Gender, Class and Domestic Service (Columbia University Press,
1994), Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life
and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State (Columbia University
Press, 2000), and The School of the Americas: Military Training
and Political Violence (Duke University Press, 2004). I regularly
teach a variety of classes that focus on racism, U.S. state policy,
Andean Latin America, and political violence.
Dolores
Koenig
Publications
My
field of interest is the economic anthropology of West Africa, especially
French-speaking countries. I am interested in finding new ways of
talking about development and social change that valorize the experiences
of local people while still taking into account the international
context of global inequalities. Specifically, I have worked on involuntary
resettlement in conjunction with dam construction and on long-term
patterns of agricultural change in Western Mali. I have also done
work on gender and kinship.
I regularly teach classes in theories of class stratification, the
anthropology of development, and the anthropology of Africa. I also
teach classes on research methods and research design. At the undergraduate
level, I teach introductory classes on sociocultural anthropology
as well as a course that looks at the ways in which today's multicultural
world came into being as a result of colonial policies and history.
Bill Leap
Publications
My research interests examine the intersections of language,
sexuality, gender, and power. I study how these intersections are
negotiated and contested in face-to-face conversations, in life
stories and other personal narratives, in public documents, and
in materials from print and broadcast media. One strand of this
work involves studies of language and homophobia, with a particular
interest in describing the processes of text formation and reception
on which communication of homophobic messages depend.
Another strand of this work focuses on language and sexual geography
in Washington DC and in late-apartheid Cape Town, South Africa.
In both urban areas, white space and white privilege continue to
dominate the sexual terrain, and language of sexuality and gender
is deeply infused with discourses of racial hierarchy. My interests
in urban gay geography, and in gay men's English (and gay men's
language use, generally), give additional dimension to this already
complex infusion.
A final strand
of this work addresses the still-marginal positioning of lesbian/gay
sexualities within anthropology (including applied anthropology)
and linguistics, and examines reasons why researchers are all too
quick to embrace theoretical stances (e.g. language and desire)
that deny the existence of the lesbian/gay speaking subject. My
work with language and AIDS, my sponsorship of the annual Lavender
Languages and Linguistics Conference (http://www.american.edu/lavenderlanguages),
and my continuing efforts to broaden lesbian/gay visibility within
the American Anthropological Association related professional organizations
are specific lines of action in this regard.
My courses
in language and culture studies emphasize the ethnography of communication
and the analysis of conversation, narrative, and other text, and
otherwise use language as the entry point for broader explorations
of cultural (including sexual) politics in late modernity. My courses
in sexuality, gender and culture draw on feminist theory, lesbian/gay
studies, queer theory, and critical race theory to situate questions
about sex and gender within that broader, late modern terrain.
My recent
publications include:
2003 Language, Belonging and (homo)sexual Citizenship in Cape Town,
South Africa in Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and
Gay Languages. William Leap and Tom Boellstorff, eds,. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
2002 Language and Gendered Modernity in Handbook of Languages
and Gender Janet McGrath and Miriam Meyerhoff, eds, pp. 401-422.
London: Blackwells.
2002 "Strangers on a train": Citizenship and the Politics
of Public Transportation in Post-apartheid Cape Town in Queer
Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism.
Arnaldo Cruz-Malave and Martin Manalansan IV, eds., New York City:
New York University Press.
Essays in press respond to recent claims about language and desire
(a paper co-authored with Liz Morrish), review recent work with
language and AIDS (a paper co-authored with Samuel Colon), and examine
the politics of gay space in Cape Town, South Africa. I am also
finishing revisions on a book-length manuscript exploring the politics
of gay space in Washington DC.
Sabiyha Prince
Publications
I
am a North Americanist whose work examines urban life in general
and African American populations in particular. In taking an anthropological
approach toward the study of black life in the United States,
for example, my work has grappled with the tension generated by
cultural and experiential differences and similarities within African
American communities and stressed the importance of the historical
and political-economic context in the study of African American
cultural formation. This leads to a pedagogical approach that analyzes
African roots, enslavement and racism, and folds in a close consideration
of fractures based on class, color, sexuality, gender, regional
origins to determine what these, and other, differences reveal about
shared cultural elements and key conflicts among African Americans.
The theoretical implications of this are reflected in my latest
article, “Manhattan Africans: Contradiction, Continuity, and
Authenticity in a Colonial Heritage” (summer 2005). This piece,
published in an edited volume entitled Afro-Atlantic Dialogues:
The Anthropology of the African Diaspora, builds upon some of the
historical findings presented in my ethnography Constructing Belonging:
Race, Class and Harlem’s Professional Workers (2004).
During the past year I have devoted some time to
writing about and researching policing in Washington, D.C. and the
impact of racialized, health disparities on African American communities.
I am primarily focused on my current ethnographic study that looks
at gentrification in the historically African American, working-class
neighborhood of Trinidad in the northeast section of D.C. Trinidad
residents contended with severe rates of crime in the 1980s and
early 1990s but the area's percentage change in tax assessment value
ranked the highest in the district during 2004-2005. By interacting
with and interviewing residents, activists, policy makers and developers,
my project examines strategies for and the impact of dislocation
in this community.
Rachel Watkins
My research
focuses on the health consequences of poverty and inequality in
the United States with an emphasis on 19th and 20th century African
American biohistory. I am interested in political-economic interpretations
of the relationship between human biology and culture; that is,
examining health as a product of social relations affecting the
unequal distribution of resources and labor.
I have used my research on the skeletal remains of poor African
Americans from Washington, DC and St. Louis, Missouri to develop
a framework that examines the relationship between health, illness
and local and extra-local factors that continually produce stratified
social, political and economic relations. As such, my work involves
the critical analysis of historical documents as well as skeletal
analysis.
I have taught Roots of Racism; Sex, Gender and Culture; and courses
on race, biology and culture.
Brett Williams
Publications
Research
I began my
work as an anthropologist working among migrant farm workers in
Illinois, exploring how they coped with terrible poverty and helping
them organize a lettuce boycott and raise money for a halfway house.
Since coming to Washington in 1976, I have written about gentrification,
displacement, and homelessness; urban renewal and public housing;
race and poverty; environmental justice; credit and debt (including
pawn shops, credit cards, and student loans). I have published four
books, including one on the African American hero John Henry, and
another, Upscaling Downtown, on failed integration in an
urban neighborhood. During the last few years my students and I
have done projects for the National Park Service, the Department
of Housing and Urban Development, the Smithsonian Institution's
Festival of American Folklife, and the Anacostia Watershed Society.
We tried to join theory and practice in promoting better public
policy and social change.
I
have taught many courses that explore the city of Washington: as national shrine,
seat of state power, residents' city, center of African American history and culture,
political colony. I teach courses on racism and poverty, ritual and taboo, anthropology
in the United States, and environmental justice. My courses often emphasize the
connections between anthropological theory and pressing social problems. Many
of my students do research projects and internships with local groups, and several
of them have collaborated with me on public anthropology projects, including studies
of how people experience and perceive Washington's national parks, and how well
new public housing programs are serving the poor. |
