University of Chicago Department of Anthropology
More Information

About the Department

Africa | East Asia | Western Europe | East Europe, Russia, Western & Central Asia | Latin America & the Caribbean | Middle East & North Africa | Native North America | US / North America | South and Southeast Asia | Oceania, Australia, New Zealand

University of Chicago Anthropologists who work in North America

Faculty
Students:
     Preparing for the field
     In the field
     Writing up
     Recent PhDs

Faculty:

  • Jessica Cattelino – Seminole tribe, Florida (citizenship and sovereignty, indigeneity, economy and value, American public culture, Indian gaming, gender, political participation, law)
  • Shannon Dawdy (A) – New Orleans, LA (Archaeology of colonial and post-colonial Americas, historical anthropology, archaeological epistemology, race and ethnicity, Creole societies)
  • Raymond Fogelson - Cherokee & Creek (No. Carolina, Oklahoma ) (psychological anthropology, primitivism, religion, tourism, museums, shamanism)
  • Joseph Masco - Los Alamos, New Mexico (Science Studies); Pacific NW (Native America); (Science studies, anthropology of security, social theory, race and nation, expressive culture)
  • Robin Shoaps - Christianities in the US and Latin America; Mexico, Guatemala (Linguistic anthropology, personhood and subjectivity, moral discourse)
  • Michael Silverstein - Wishram & Wasco Chinookan, Tsimshian ( Washington, Oregon, British Columbia ); Worora & related Northern Kimberley groups (Near Derby, Western Australia); (Language, semiotics of communication, culture and cognition)
  • Raymond Smith - Guyana, Jamaica, Ghana, Chicago, IL
  • George Stocking - Chicago, IL (History of Anthropology)

to top

STUDENTS:

Preparing for the Field 

  • John Arden (JD/PhD) - Legal Anthropology (anthropology of law, globalization and state sovereignty-legitimacy, the rule of law, US lawyers, NGOs, Alien Tort Claims Act litigation)
  • Emilia Arellano - Zacatecas, Mexico/Chicago (Circulation & subjectivity, the semiotics of civic practices, social space; the investment of collective remittances in public works projects and the politics of long-distance membership in Zacatecas, Mexico)
  • J. Ckristafer Baker - Urban US (Embodiment and marginalization; female-to-male transitioning; "Transitions: How Female-to Male Experience and Practice vs Western Biomedical Embodiments of ‘Manhood')
  • Alexander Blanchette - US Southwest/Texas Panhandle (American industrial agriculture/pork production; pastoral ideologies; migrant/undocumented labor; language an place/space; theories of value, political ecology)
  • Megan Edwards (A) - British Atlantic colonies (North America and Ireland; early modern British expansion, historical archaeology, foodways)
  • Falina Enriquez - US and Brazil (Body ideals/aesthetics, plastic surgery, discourse; Foucauldian bio-power, media, medical anthropology, linguistic anthropology; metaphor in Hopi ritual song)
  • D. Ryan Gray (A) - New Orleans (Historical archaeology; crime, criminality, and identity in the 19th century; housing policy, urban development, and contested spaces)
  • Anna Jabloner  - US? (Science Studies, laboratory studies, genetics; gender, ethnicity, ‘race,' science and technology, history of science, life sciences, queer studies)
  • Frederick Ketchum (MD/PhD) - US and Germany (Medical anthropology; performance enhancing drugs (sports, mood improvement, etc), cognitive improvement, "cosmetic psychopharmacology," the nexus of drug enhancements, medicine and identity)
  • Elise Kramer - US (Linguistic anthropology, semiotics, gender, sexuality, technology and communication, humor, medical anthropology)
  • Averill Leslie - Vermont (Community identities, citizenship, gender and sexuality, reproductive technologies, democracy, historical anthropology, anthropology of knowledge, Native North America; Abenaki Indians and gays/lesbians in Vermont and discourses of "real" Vermonthood)
  • Laurence Ralph - US (Theories of domination and resistance, anthropological theories of value, semiotics, ethnography of gangs and rap music; "The Poetics and Parallel Economies of Crack Music")
  • (Shana) Ender Ricart - North America/France (Linguistic Anthropology, religious movements, religious language, mass media, popular culture, consumerism, symbolic anthropology)
  • Jennifer Rozo (A) - US Southwest (Pueblo people and the early Spanish colonial period; pollen analysis, landscape)
  • Nelly Samoukova - US and Russia (Medical anthropology; authority, legitimacy, religion, popular culture, consumption and identity, politics of the body; "Chiropractic medicine as a case study of the construction of medical legitimacy in the US")
  • Benjamin White - US (Christianity [megachurches], hegemony, elites, suburbia, spatiality)
  • Lauren Zych (A) - US Southeast (Late prehistoric period, colonialism, "first encounters," ceramic analysis)

to top

In the Field 

  • Rebecca Graff (A) - Chicago, IL; "The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition: Consumption, Tourism, and the Archaeology of Event in Chicago's Jackson Park"
  • Zada Johnson - New Orleans/Caribbean; "The Second-Linve After the Storm: Race and Space in the Street Parade Traditions of Post-Katrina New Orleans"
  • Michelle Lelièvre (A) - Nova Scotia "Wijswin (‘You move from one place to another'): Understanding Mi'kmaw Mobility in Post-Contact Nova Scotia"
  • Sarah Luna - US/Mexico; "The Threat of the Gringo's Erotic Playground: Sex Wrok, Mexican Natiionalism, and the US/Mexico Border"
  • Jolie Nahigian - Chicago, Los Angeles, New York; "Making Culinary Worlds: Craft, Commodity and Cuisine in American Restaurants [Haute Cuisine]"
  • Mihir Pandya - US/Los Angeles; "The Aerospace Industry in Southern California, Past and Present"
  • Gretchen Pfeil (Ling.) - US-based Evangelical missionary organizations/Senegal; "Small Change, Big Changes: Religious Commitments and the High Stakes of Small Charitable Gifts in Dakar, Senegal" (primary field site is Senegal)
  • Jonathan Rosa (Ling.) - Chicago, IL; "Learning to Hear a Nation's Limits: Language Ideologies and the Fashioning of EthnoRacial Difference in a US High School"
  • Abigail Rosenthal (Ling.) - Sioux Falls, SD; "How a Deaf Community is Constructed within American Urban Spaces"
  • Eitan Wilf - Boston, MA, New York, NY; "The Entextualization of Jazz Music in Professional Schools in the US -- An Ethnographic Study"
  • Hannah Woodroofe - Youngstown, OH (Local social implications of deindustrialization in Youngstown, Ohio; forms of work left in the wake of an industrial legacy, emergence of private prison services)

to top

Writing Up 

  • Frank Bechter (Ling) - Deaf Community/Gallaudet University, Washington DC; "Of Deaf Lives: Convert Culture and the Dialogic of ASL Storytelling"
  • Jenifer Blaxall Buice - New York City (Education/Schools); "Pedagogy and the Paradoxes of Democratic Education: On the Quality of Education in U.S. Schools"
  • Gwen Faulkner - US/Guatemala (Chicago Guatemalan community) "Making War and Making Peace from Abroad: Guatemalan Refugees as Transnational Actors"
  • Catherine Fennell - US Urban/Chicago; "Civic Concerns: Intimacy and Risk in Redeveloping Chicago Public Housing"
  • Lee Kochems - New York City; "Gay Culture: Identity and Assertive Symbolic Activity among Gay Men in America"
  • Rocío Magaña - Mexico/US border: Arizona-Sonora; "Desert Interventions: Life, Death and Sovereignty along the Arizona-Mexico Border"
  • James Rizzo - Reno, Nevada; "No Desire is Lost: The Epistemology and Ethics of Capitalism" (on competitive gambling)
  • Galit Sarfaty (JD/PhD) - Washington, DC; "The Marginality of Human Rights at the World Bank"
  • Kate Schechter - US/Chicago - U.S. mental health professions, psychoanalysis/ psychotherapy, psychological anthropology, language & subjectivity.
  • Michael Scher (JD/PhD) - Chicago, IL (Computing); "Cultural Practice, Legal Norms and Intellectual Banditry in the Contemporary United States [Computer crime, resistance, and historical precedents]

to top

Recent PhDs

  • Nahum Chandler – US; “The Problem of Purity: A Study in the Early Thought of W.E.B. DuBois”
  • Lorri Clark - Chicago, IL; “Developing Responsibility: The Cultural Context of Worker Education in Chicago
  • E. Gabriella Coleman - Silicon Valley, California; “The Social Creation of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics and the Liberal Tradition"
  • Nicholas DeGenova - Mexico City & Chicago; “Working the Boundaries, Making the Difference: Race & Space in Mexican Chicago”
  • Anjali Fedson (MD/PhD) - U of Chicago Hospitals-Neonatal Intensive Care Unit; “Mechanical Reproduction: Neonatal Intensive Care, Medical Ethics, and the Technological Imperative”
  • Ilana Gershon - Auckland, New Zealand; San Francisco, USA; “Making Differences Cultural: Samoan Migrant Families Encounter New Zealand and United States Bureaucracy”
  • Thomas Guthrie – Santa Fe, New Mexico; “Recognizing New Mexico: Heritage Development and Cultural Politics in the Land of Enchatment"
  • Carolyn Johnson - Chicago, IL (Indonesian & Filipino Communities; ethnomusicology); “Performing Ethnicity: Performance Events in Chicago, 1893-1996”
  • William Kelley - Chicago, IL; “Understanding Gender Segregation at Work: A Study of the Values of Men and Women in Audio and Video Engineering”
  • Anne Lorimer - Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, IL; “‘Reality Word’: Constructing Reality Through Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry”
  • Robert McLaughlin (JD/PhD) - San Diego, California (immigration law); “Reshaping a Citizenry: Naturalization in Southern California”
  • Marina Peterson - Los Angeles; “Sounding the City: Public Concerts and Civic Belonging in Los Angeles"
  • Joshua Price - Chicago & New York City; “Spaces of Violence, Shades of Meaning: The Heterogeneity of Violence against Women in the US”
  • Paitra Russell - Chicago, IL; “Styling Blackness: African American Hair Styling Practices in Late Twentieth Century America and the Phenomenology of Race”
  • Nathan Sayre - Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, Southern Arizona; “An Anthropological Investigation of the Buenos Aires Ranch (Pima County, Arizona) and Its Transformation into a National Wildlife Refuge
  • DeWitt Smith - Key West, Florida; “Among Touram: Community Study of a Small City at the Marginal Heart of American Culture”
  • S. Hoon Song - Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania; “The Great Pigeon Massacre: The Bestiary Biopolitics of Whiteness in a Deindustrializing America”
  • Dawnie Wolfe Steadman (P) - Central Illinois River Valley; “Population Genetic Analysis of Regional and Interregional prehistoric Gene Flow in West-Central Illinois”
  • Holly Swyers - Chicago (Education/Schools); “Succeed Anyway: Life and Lessons in American High Schools”
  • Mateo Taussig-Rubbo (JD/PhD) - Los Angeles, CA (immigration law); “The Sovereign's Gift: Reciprocity and Invisibility in US Immigration Detention Camps"
  • Bruce Tharp - Topeka, IN; “Ascetic Value: The Stuff of the Old Order Amish”
  • Janelle Taylor - U Chicago Hospitals Ultrasonography Lab; “Mediating Reproduction: An Ethnography of Obstetrical Ultrasound”

to top