News
The department is proud to announce that Professor John Pemberton has been awarded a Faculty Recognition Award by the Dean of Social Sciences in honor of his contributions to study in the field.
Jorge Alejandro Rodriguez Solorano's paper “Betting on the State: Indigenous Legal Activism in Mexico’s Reforma Indigena (2024)” has been selected for this year’s Law & Humanities Workshop at Stanford University on June 9-10, 2025. Congratulations Jorge!
In 'Strange Abundance,' Catherine Fennell asks whether deconstruction can unlock resources abandoned in late industrial cities. Read and see the photo-essay here.
What does the landscape of extractivism look like? What is desire in and of the underground? Rosalind Morris reflects on the art and career of one of South Africa's pre-eminent painters, and the queer perspectivalism that he invented to describe his punctured and porous world.
Following the deaths of 78 informal miners in South Africa, Rosalind Morris published an analytic Op Ed in 'The Conversation' and was interviewed by Richard Poplack for the Daily Maverick. You can read her piece in 'The Conversation' here.
PhD candidate, Aamer Ibraheem, has published a photo essay on workers' perspectives on the Golan Heights in the new issue of the flagship journal Current Anthropology. You can read and view his essay, "Elevated: Attuned to White Things," here.
Congratulations to PhD candidate, Marini Thorne, who has been awarded a graduate research fellowship from the Center for Political Economy at Columbia World Projects. The grant will underwrite ongoing research on gig work and new forms of labor in contemporary India.
Congratulations to Professor Samantha Maurer Fox, who has won the 2024 Critical Urban Anthropology Association's City & Society Best Paper Prize. The prize was given for Professor Fox's paper, entitled 'A City of Newcomers: Migration and Solidarity in the Former East Germany.'
Congratulations to Elizabeth Povinelli, who has been awarded a doctorate honoris causa by the University of Antwerp/Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, citing her contributions to critical theory, anthropology, decolonization and the arts.
Claudio Lomnitz's recent book, Sovereignty and Extortion: A New State Form in Mexico, was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (by Benjamin T Smith) as well as the Latin American Review of Books (by Gavin O'Toole) and was the subject of the KPFA radio program "Books and Letters."
In a contribution to the festschrift for James T Siegel and an anniversary volume devoted to Freud's Group Psychology, Rosalind Morris takes up the question of accusation, in history and in the academy ("Allegories and Algorithms of the Purge: Thinking with James Siegel, Once Again," in Indonesia), and the different itineraries of white melancholia in the US and South Africa ("The Lessons of an Absent Teacher" in Then and Now: On the Crowd, the Subject and the Collective).
The journal, Focaal, listed Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton UP, 1996) and our alumna Xenia Cherkaev’s, Gleaning for Communism: The Soviet Socialist Household in Theory and Practice (Cornell UP 2023) among its list of most important works. Congratulations to both!
Congratulations to Minny Lee, who has won the 2024 American Anthropological Association's Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition's Christine Wilson Graduate Award. The prize was given for a chapter of Minny's MA thesis, entitled 'Korean Buddhist Temple Food: The Embodiment of Buddhist Philosophy and Buddhist Practice.'
PhD candidate Aamer Ibraheem published a book chapter, "Reincarnated: Common Sense and the Poetics of Elsewhere" in the edited volume "Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine Through Contemporary Media", eds.Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar. He also delivered a public talk titled "Present Interruptus: Sovereignty's Reincarnation in the Golan Heights," as part of the public Scholar Colloquia at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe.