University of Chicago: Department of Anthropology: About the Department

University of Chicago Anthropologists who work in North America

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

Faculty:

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)

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STUDENTS:

Preparing for the Field

John Arden (JD/PhD) - Legal Anthropology (Anthropology of law, state sovereignty and globalization, transnational and international legal practice, NGOs, advocacy, cultural construction of the rule of law, human rights; litigation under the Alien Tort Claims Act)
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)
Ella Butler - Conservative Protestants; media, technology and aesthetics, anthropology of religion, secularity, American public culture
Angelica Felice - Sociolinguistics, English-speaking urban centers; race, gender, media
D. Ryan Gray (A) - New Orleans (Historical archaeology of New Orleans; urban 'slums' and informal development in cities; urban development and contested space; unplanned development and populations that are poorly documented in the historic record; crime, criminality, and identity in the 19th century)
Anna Jabloner - US and Germany (Race and genomics, anthropology of science, feminist science studies; "Multicultural Technologies of 'Race': The Politics of Classification in US and German Gene Databases")
Andrea Jenkins - The Americas/Atlantic world (Settler nations; indigenous peoples of the Americas, African diaspora, education, social movements, race, marginalization)
Frederick Ketchum (MD/PhD) - US and Germany (Medical anthropology; performance enhancing drugs (sports, mood improvement, etc), cognitive improvement, "cosmetic psychopharmacology," agency, subjectivity, identity; ethics)
Elise Kramer - US (Linguistic anthropology, gender, language ideologies, political discourse, humor, technology; "Ideologies of free speech in the US; the free speech/political correctness debate")
Averill Leslie - Vermont (Local govertnment and community life in northern Vermont, citizenship, kinship, democracy, alterity, common sense, discourses of "real" Vermonterhood)
Madeleine McLeester (A) - US urban/Chicago/Calumet (Political ecology, landscape theory, archaeobotanical analysis, human/environment interactions, historical archaeology; "Reclaiming Nature: How Social Imaginations of Nature Shape the Calumet Landscape through Time")
Brenden Raymond-Yakoubian US (Limits of knowledge [skepticism and its problems, metaphysical uncertainty and doubt]; mental disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder & its treatment)
Jennifer Rozo (A) - US Southwest/New Mexico (Pueblo groups under Spanish colonialism; landscape, archaeobotany)
Lisa Simeone - Chicago/Paris/West Africa (Globalization, international migration [Senegal to France to the US], mobility and membership beyond the postcology, cultures of capitalism; citizenship and difference; "Looking Homeward: Africans Living Race, Place and Desire in Paris and Chicago")
Kaya Williams - Transgression, gender, race, criminal justice
Lauren Zych (A) - US Southeast, New Orleans (Handmade earthenwares of probable Native American manufacture on French colonial sites in New Orleans)

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In the Field

J. Ckristafer Baker - Urban US (Embodiment and marginalization) "Female-to-Male Embodiment and Practice: An Ethnography of Gender as a Social Category in the US"
Alexander Blanchette - US Southwest/Texas Panhandle (American agribusiness ["factory" hog farms], farm labor and organization; political ecology, cultural studies of capitalism, industrial history; "The Industrialization of Life, Capitalist Natures, and the American Factory Farm")
Mihir Pandya - US/Los Angeles; (Aerospace Industry in Southern California); "Secrecy by Design: Tracing the Stealth Project in Postwar California"
Abigail Rosenthal (Ling.) - Sioux Falls, SD; "How a Deaf Community is Constructed within American Urban Spaces"
Hannah Woodroofe - Youngstown, OH (Local social implications of deindustrialization in Youngstown, Ohio; forms of work left in the wake of an industrial legacy)

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Writing Up

Rebecca Graff (A) - Chicago, IL; "The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition: Public Archaeology, Consumption and Tourism in Chicago's Jackson Park"
Zada Johnson - New Orleans/Caribbean; "Still We March On: Race, Space and Remembrance in the African-American Street Parade Tradition of Post-Katrina New Orleans"
Jeffrey Kahn - New York City/Haiti (Legal anthropology, sovereignty, nation-state, liberalism; space, place and circulation, biomedicine, biopolitics, HIV/AIDS), "Cracking Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire"
Lee Kochems - New York City; "Gay Culture: Identity and Assertive Symbolic Activity among Gay Men in America"
Michelle Lelièvre (A) - Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia; "Crucible of Colonialism: Maligomish [Nova Scotia] and the Construction of Indigenous Social Landscapes in the Post-Contact Northeast (ca 1758-1930)"
Sarah Luna - Reynosa, Texas/Mexico border; "Selling Sex and Making the Nation on the US/Mexican Border"
Jolie Nahigian - Chicago, Los Angeles, New York; "Making Culinary Worlds: Craft, Commodity and Cuisine in American Restaurants [Haute Cuisine]"
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)
Laurence Ralph - US/Chicago (Theories of domination and resistance, anthropological theories of value, semiotics, ethnography of gangs and rap music); " 'You Never Ever Hear about the Wheelchair': Violence, Debt and Disability in a Chicago Street Gang")
Jonathan Rosa (Ling.) - Chicago, IL; "Spanglish-Only: Language Ideologies and the Fashioning of EthnoRacial Difference in a U.S. High School"
Galit Sarfaty (JD/PhD) - Washington, DC; "Human Rights and the Culture of 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]
Eitan Wilf - Boston, MA, New York, NY; "Transcending the Jazz Standard: Post-Secondary Jazz Education and the Problem of Cultural Standardization"

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Recent PhDs

Frank Bechter (Ling) - Deaf Community/Gallaudet University, Washington DC; "Of Deaf Lives: Convert Culture and the Dialogic of ASL Storytelling"
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”
Catherine Fennell - US Urban/Chicago; "The Last Project Standing: Building an Ethics for a City without Public Housing"
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”
Rocío Magaña - Mexico/US border: Arizona-Sonora; "Bodies on the Line: Life, Death, and Authority on the Arizona-Mexico Border"
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”

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