Shannon Lee Dawdy

(PhD, U Michigan 2003) Assistant Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, is a historical anthropologist and archaeologist concentrating on the Atlantic World after 1450. Her research focuses on the Southeast U.S. and Caribbean, particularly Louisiana and Cuba. Her interdisciplinary projects seek to understand maritime and creole societies in their own ethnographic terms while engaging with broader issues such as colonialism, modernity, and informal economies. Her first single-author book, Building the Devil's Empire, develops the idea of rogue colonialism to explain the ways in which French New Orleans, and many colonies like it, functioned outside state controls. Related topics of her research and teaching include urban planning, food, gender and sexuality, disaster, temporality, and race and ethnicity. Recent fieldwork has focused on garden and hospitality sites in New Orleans (Pitot House, Rising Sun Hotel, St. Antoine's Garden). This work informs her current book project, Patina: An Archaeology of Everyday Aesthetics, which seeks to understand the connections between aesthetics and social life.

For a review of the on-going archeology project at St.Antoine's Garden in New Orleans, go to:
http://home.uchicago.edu/~sdawdy/stantoinesarch/

E-mail: sdawdy@uchicago.edu

Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Publications:

2008 Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. University of Chicago Press.

2008 Dumont de Montigny: Regards sur le monde atlantique, 1715-1747. (Co-ed. with C. Zecher and G. Sayre.) Québec/Paris: Septentrion.

2008 Comment on Gender, Race, and Labor in the Archeology of the Spanish-Colonial Americas by Barbara Voss. Current Anthropology 49(5):876-877.

2008 Disaster Preparedness. In David William Cohen et al., eds., Trans/Formations of the Disciplines: Evaluating the Project of Anthropology and History. University of Michigan Press (in press).

2008 Colonial and Early Antebellum New Orleans. (With Christopher N. Matthews.) In Mark Rees, ed., The Archaeology of Louisiana. Louisiana State University Press (in press).

2008 Scoundrels, Whores, and Gentlemen: Defamation and Society in French Colonial Louisiana. In R.F. Brown, ed., Coastal Encounters: The Transformation of the Gulf South in the Eighteenth Century. University of Nebraska Press, 132-150.

2008 Excavating the Present, Vindicating the Dead (invited commentary). Historical Archaeology 42(2):152-156.

2008 Colonial and Creole Diets in Eighteenth-Century New Orleans. (With Elizabeth M. Scott.) In K. Kelly and M. Hardy, eds., French Colonial Archaeology: A view from the South. Gainesville: University Press of Florida (in press).

2008 Beneath the Rising Sun: 'Frenchness' and the Archaeology of Desire. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 11(3):370-387 (with Richard Weyhing).

2007 A French Soldier in Louisiana: The Memoir of Dumont de Montigny. The French Review 80(6): 1265-1277 (with Carla Zecher and Gordon M. Sayre).

2007 La Nouvelle-Orléans au xviie siècle: courants d'échanges dans le monde caraïbe [original English title: Undercurrents of the Atlantic World: The View from Eighteenth-Century New Orleans]. Annales (Paris, Fall 2007) 62(3): 663-685.

2006 The Taphonomy of Disaster and the (Re)formation of New Orleans. American Anthropologist. 108(4): 719-730.

2006 In Katrina's Wake. Archaeology 59(4) 16-21.

2006 The Burden of Louis Congo and the Evolution of Savagery in Colonial Louisiana. In S. Pierce & A. Rao, eds., Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism. Duke University Press, 61-89.

2006 Proper Caresses and Prudent Distance: A How-to Manual from Louisiana. In A.L. Stoler, ed., Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Duke University Press, 140-162.

2005 Thinker-Tinkers, Race, and the Archaeological Critique of Modernity. Archaeological Dialogues 12(2): 143-164.

2005 (Co-ed. w/ A. Curet & G. La Rosa) Dialogues in Cuban Archaeology. University of Alabama Press.

2003 Enlightenment from the Ground: Le Page du Pratz’ Histoire de la Louisiane. French Colonial History 3: 17-34.

2002 La Comida Mambisa: Food, Farming, and Cuban Identity, 1834-1999. New West Indian Guide 76(1-2): 47-80.

2000 Understanding Cultural Change through the Vernacular: Creolization in Louisiana . Historical Archaeology 34(3): 107-123.

2000 Ethnicity in the Urban Landscape: The Archaeology of Creole New Orleans. In A. Young, ed., Archaeology of Southern Urban Landscapes. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 127-149.

1995 The Meherrin’s Secret History of the Dividing Line. North Carolina Historical Review. 72(4): 386-415.