News
Congratulations to Zarino Lanni on being awarded a research fellowship by the Fondazione Migrantes! This generous award will fund his fieldwork in southern Italy the next academic year. Zarino's research interests lie at the intersection of migrant labor, housing projects in Black rural communities, and the politics of solidarity in Europe. For more information on this research project, visit: https://anthropology.columbia.edu/content/zarino-lanni
Congratulations to Maria José de Abreu, whose book, O Ginásio Carismático: Católicos Neopentecostais?, has been translated by GLAC Editions. You can purchase the book here.
The Middle East Studies Association posthumously awarded Brinkley Messick the 2025 MESA Mentoring Award. The MESA Mentoring Award was established in 1995 and first given at MESA’s 1996 annual meeting. The award recognizes exceptional contributions retired faculty have made to the education and training of others.
You can read the announcement here.
Congratulations to Mahmood Mamdani on the publication of his most recent book, Slow Poison: Idi Amin, Yoweri Museveni, and the Making of the Ugandan State. The book was launched at the Heyman Center, and has arleady been widely reviewed in The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal, among other venues.
Congratulations to E. Mara Green on her recent receipt of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology's New Voices Book Prize! The prize was announced the American Anthropology Association's annual meeting. Established in 2021, it is a biennial prize awarded to a book by a junior scholar (published within twelve years of the PhD) that makes a pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of language in society, or the ways in which language mediates historical or contemporary sociocultural processes.
Claudio Lomnitz published an op-ed titled "Mexico’s Day of the Dead Needs a New Life" in the New York Times. You can read his piece here.
An advance of Claudio Lomnitz's forthcoming book, Antropología de la Zona de Silencio published in Nexos.
Congratulations to Zoë Crossland, who has been honored this year with the invitation to deliver the 2025 McDonald Lecture at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. The lecture, the 37th in the series, will be delivered on November 26. at the Yusuf Hamied Centre, Christ's College, and will be titled 'After Landscape.' Remote attendance is available via the link here.
Lila Abu-Lughod publishes "From the Politics of Representation to the Ethics of Decolonization: What MENA Social Research Can Learn from the 'Indigenous Turn'" in Daedalus, Spring 2025 volume 154 number 2. You can read her piece in Daedalus here.
Lila Abu-Lughod delivered the Keynote Lecture " Decolonizing Research/Politicizing Ethics" for the workshop on "Feminist Epistemologies and Area Studies" at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, part of the program of EHESS on Social Sciences and the World.
In this year's 'Juliet Mitchell lecture,' at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, Lila Abu-Lughod revisited Marilyn Stathern's famous essay, 'An Awkward Relationship: The Case of Feminism and Anthropology.'
Yet another wonderful set of achievements by our doctoral students.
In her new short essay, On the Disappearance of Fireflies, Maria José de Abreu engages with the writings of Paolo Pier Pasolini in his Corsair Writings (1973-1975) and the topic of authoritarianism.
You can read her piece in the Critical Times here.
Anthropology alum, Dr. Fernando Montero and Dr. Nabila El-Bassel have received a 3-year R34 grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop their concept of supply-side harm reduction, working with Puerto Rican and Black people who sell drugs in Philadelphia to design and pilot a drug overdose and HIV prevention intervention. With the study, they aim to reverse the historical exclusion of people who sell drugs from public health research and harm reduction interventions.