Shannon Lee Dawdy

About

Contact Information

Office: Haskell 202
Phone: (773) 834-0829
Email: sdawdy@uchicago.edu
Website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~sdawdy/stantoinesarch/

(PhD, U Michigan 2003) Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences in the College, is a historical anthropologist and archaeologist whose fieldwork focuses on the American South and Gulf of Mexico (esp. Louisiana, eastern Mexico, Cuba, 17th c.-present). Her first single-author book, Building the Devil's Empire, offers 'rogue colonialism' to explain how French New Orleans, and many colonies like it, functioned outside state controls. Current themes of research and teaching include: piracy and informal economies; aesthetics, affect, and sensoria; temporality; gender and sexuality; fetish and thing theory; death and disaster. She also continues to advise on earlier interests in race and ethnicity, food, colonialism, and urbanity. Recent fieldwork has focused on garden, market, and hospitality sites in New Orleans (Pitot House, Rising Sun Hotel, St. Antoine's Garden, Ursuline Convent). This work informs Dawdy's current book project called Patina: A Profane Archaeology of Romantic Things, which reconsiders the intimate relations of capitalism -- between people as well as between people and things -- with attention to temporality, gender, and affect. For a review of the archeology project at St. Antoine's Garden in New Orleans, go to: http://home.uchicago.edu/~sdawdy/stantoinesarch/

Selected Works

Selected Publications

Year Title / Publications PDF
in prep Patina: A Profane Archaeology of Romantic Things.
2012 Towards a General Theory of Piracy (with Joe Bonni). Anthropological Quarterly [summer, 2012]
2011 Why Pirates Are Back. Annual Review of Law and Social Science 7: 361-385.
2011 Sexualizing Space: The Colonial Leer and the Genealogy of Storyville. In Sexual Effects: The Archaeology of Imperial Intimacies & Colonial Entanglements. eds. Barbara Voss and Eleanor Casella. Cambridge University Press: 271:289.
2011 (with Elizabeth M. Scott) Colonial and Creole Diets in Eighteenth-Century New Orleans. In K. Kelly and M. Hardy, eds., French Colonial Archaeology: A view from the South. Gainesville: University Press of Florida: 97-116.
2010 Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity. Current Anthropology 51(6):761-793.
2010 ‘A Wild Taste’: Food and Colonialism in Eighteenth-century Louisiana. Ethnohistory 57(3):389-414.
2010 Disaster Preparedness. In Edward Murphy, David William Cohen et al., eds., Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline. University of Michigan Press, 140-155.
2010 (with Christopher N. Matthews) Colonial and Early Antebellum New Orleans. In Mark Rees, ed., The Archaeology of Louisiana. Louisiana State University Press, 273-290.
2009 Millennial Archaeology: Locating the Discipline in the Age of Insecurity/Doomsday Confessions. Invited discussion article, Archaeological Dialogues 16(2): 131-142, 186-193.
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 Beneath the Rising Sun: ‘Frenchness’ and the Archaeology of Desire. International Journal of Historical Archaeology 11(3):370-387 (with Richard Weyhing).
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.
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 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.