News
Congratulations to Naor Ben-Yehoyada, who has been recognized this year with the 2023 Columbia University Faculty Mentoring Award. The Arts and Sciences Graduate Council (ASGC) instituted this award in 2004 to commemorate excellence in the mentoring of PhD and MA students. This award is a student initiative; selections were made entirely by graduate student representatives from GSAS and affiliated schools based on student nomination letters spanning across all disciplines.
Congratulations to David Scott, who has recently been named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2023-2024. In addition, his new book, 'The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialogue,' cowritten with Orlando Patterson and published by Polity Press, has just arrived.The Paradox of Freedom is an exploration of the life and work of Orlando Patterson, probing the relationship between the circumstances of his life from their beginnings in rural Jamaica to the present and the complex development of his intellectual work. A novelist and historical sociologist with an orientation toward public engagement, Patterson exemplifies one way of being a Jamaican and Black Atlantic intellectual.
Rosalind Morris's article, "The Ancestors Call from the Future: Ancestrally, Genealogy, Judgment," appeared this quarter in Comparative Literature Studies, volume 61, no 1
The Department of Anthropology congratulates Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Anthropology, on her election to the new class of fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. For more information, visit the Academy's website.
Deadline *EXTENDED*: 4:00pm; Tuesday, April 4, 2023
Questions concerning this research fellowship may be addressed to the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology:
Professor Naor Ben-Yehoyada, [email protected] (Fall)
Professor Maria José de Abreu, [email protected] (Spring)
Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj was recently interviewed for a two-episode series from The Dig, a weekly podcast presented by Jacobin magazine. Both episodes revolve around discussions of the content and background El-Haj's book: Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America, and the effects of post-9/11 war policy on American civilian identity.
The first episode - Combat Trauma w/ Nadia Abu El-Haj - can be found here. The second episode - American Militarism w/ Nadia Abu El-Haj - can be found here. More information about The Dig is available through their Patreon.
"Held in Suspense: Promise, Threat and Revocability as Modalities of Governance," guest-edited by Syantani Chatterjee (PhD '20), Luciana Chamorro Elizondo (PhD '20), and Fernando Montero (PhD '20), has been put into press by the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology as a special issue for March 2023. The volume additionally features an afterword by Professor Maria José de Abreu.
An introductory editorial describes the volume as "salient reading in a moment of overlapping geopolitical, economic, health and environmental crises – one in which ‘normality’ seems continually suspended. Yet this issue also reminds us that the very image of ‘normality’ (qua freedom, sufficiency, security) that is often taken for granted in the Global North is a historically specific product, a privilege enjoyed by a relative minority. For many others, suspension may well be ‘normality’, an everyday condition that is oriented towards (persistently deferred) futures and social orders."
More information about the work and the featured articles can be accessed through The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology.
Rosalind Morris will join the inaugural year (2023-2024) of fellows at the newly established Leuphana Institute for Advanced Study in Culture and Society, where she will complete work on her Guggenheim prize-winning project, 'Anatomy Lessons of a Miner.' For more information on the LIAS, an interdisciplinary project that bridges the Humanities and the Social Sciences, visit the Institute's website.
Congratulations to Nan Rothschild and her co-authors for winning this year's Society for American Archaeology Popular Book Award, for Buried Beneath the City: An Archaeological History of New York (Columbia University Press).
Professor Lila Abu-Lughod was interviewed by Aiman Rizvi of Qatar Museums for the piece "Confronting Representations."
In this wide-ranging and fascinating study of the meshing of medicine, science, and politics, Abu El-Haj explores the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder and the history of its medical diagnosis. While antiwar Vietnam War veterans sought to address their psychological pain even as they maintained full awareness of their guilt and responsibility for perpetrating atrocities on the killing fields of Vietnam, by the 1980s, a peculiar convergence of feminist activism against sexual violence and Reagan’s right-wing “war on crime” transformed the idea of PTSD into a condition of victimhood. In so doing, the meaning of Vietnam veterans’ trauma would also shift, moving away from a political space of reckoning with guilt and complicity to one that cast them as blameless victims of a hostile public upon their return home. This is how, in the post-9/11 era of the Wars on Terror, the injunction to "support our troops," came to both sustain US militarism and also shields American civilians from the reality of wars fought ostensibly in their name.