News

Current, by Rosalind C. Morris is a verse sequence of 7 poems that undertakes a meditation on capital punishment. The images accompanying the poems, by Carrie Mae Weems, are from the series 'All the Boys,' and are reproduced by gracious permission of the artist and the Jack Shainman Gallery.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli has a new piece in Noema Magazine, which is published by the Berggruen Institute. You can find the article, entitled "A Fire on the Ancestors' Road to Bamayak" here. 

Victoire Mandonnaud and 'The Victories' released their debut album, 'The very best of' this week. You can listen to it on Apple Music or Spotify.

Application Deadline Now Extended:  Monday, March 31, 2021

Access a PDF of application guidelines here.

The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce the Ella Deloria Undergraduate Research Fellowships: departmentally funded ethnographic research fellowships for Columbia Anthropology majors pursuing fieldwork during the summer between their junior and senior years.  Offered since 2010, the fellowships are intended for research in preparation for writing a senior thesis or in connection with an independent study project.  Awards will be made based on the quality of an applicant's proposal as well as an applicant's preparation for the proposed research.  Award resources permit fellowships of up to $1000 to approximately ten Anthropology juniors.

While the Ella Deloria Undergraduate Research Fellowship program is designed to support research among Columbia Anthropology majors, it is intended as well as a way of honoring the memory of Ella Cara Deloria (1889-1971), member of a prominent Sioux family, a graduate of Columbia University (B.A. in education, 1914), one of the first truly bilingual, bicultural figures in American anthropology, and an extraordinary scholar, teacher, and spirit who pursued her own work and commitments under notoriously adverse conditions.  At one point, she lived out of a car while collecting material for Franz Boas.  Her publications include the definitive linguistic works Dakota Texts (1932) and Dakota Grammar (1941); the ethnographic classic on Dakota culture, Speaking of Indians (1944); and the virtually avant-garde Waterlily (begun in the 1940s), a novel/ethnography which pushed the boundaries of academic writing:  an "unself-conscious and never precious or quaint pairing of scholarship and fiction" (Kirkus Reviews).  It is to Ella Deloria's spirit that the Department of Anthropology's undergraduate research fellowship program is dedicated.

HOW TO APPLY

Applicants should submit a proposal articulating the following: 1) the purpose of the project and your understanding of its anthropological significance (What makes this project so compelling?); 2) the particular skills, experience, and studies the applicant brings to the project (How have you prepared for this project and what literature do you draw on?); and 3) a detailed description of exactly how the project will be carried out (What sorts of questions will be asked? What is the project's specific focus? Where is the project site and what is its timing?).  The proposal should include a project title as well as a brief budget. The complete proposal should be no longer, than four double-spaced pages. One copy of the proposal should be submitted by email to Marilyn Astwood at [email protected].  Deadline: 4:00pm; Monday, March 31, 2021

Questions concerning this research fellowship may be addressed to the Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology:

Professor Naor Ben-Yehoyada; 470 Schermerhorn Extension; 212-854-8936; [email protected]

 

Please follow the link below to find complete course descriptions for the Summer 2021 semester in the Department of Anthropology.

Summer 2021 Courses

Professor Paige West's work has been featured on Columbia University's Earth Institute's blog, 'State of the Planet.' The piece outlines the history of her work, with special emphasis on her recent nomination as a part of the “Explorers Club 50: Fifty People Changing the World the World Needs to Know About.” You can read more here about Professor West's work in Papua New Guinea on indigenous sovereignty and biodiversity efforts. 

Yvette Christiansë, Zaid Jabri and Rosalind Morris, are thrilled to announce their receipt of a major award from the Sloan Foundation for their new opera, ‘Southern Crossings.’ The Foundation announced its grant for the opera this February. The project will be housed at Barnard College’s Africana Studies, which will also develop an educational program to accompany the opera, slated for production in late 2021.

“The material support from Sloan, and the confidence that it expresses in our project, makes it possible for us to now take our idea, realized in the musical score and the libretto, and make it real as a performance. We are honored and excited, as well as grateful, to be working with Sloan.”

 

Southern Crossings, synopsis

In the century of discovery, of empire and emancipation, six characters confront each other with their fears and doubts about what science demands, and what it may cost them and those whose world it is about to transform. SouthernCrossings is a chamber opera that takes audiences back in time, to 1836, when the famed astronomer, John Herschel and his wife, Margaret, are about to return to England from Cape Town where, two years earlier, they had hosted Charles Darwin on his return voyage on the Beagle. Darwin took inspiration from Herschel to tackle ‘the mystery of mysteries’; Herschel hoped Darwin would join his crusade for abolition. Nonetheless, the dinner was not a great success. While packing with her servants, whom the Herschels have manumitted and who now await their freedom in a period of mandatory apprenticeship, Margaret recalls the dinner in the dream-image of what might have been. As she does so, the servants have their own conversation about what they overheard that evening (tales of people abducted from Tierra del Fuego and animals they havenever seen), and what they desire for a future after bondage.

 

 

 

 

Claudio Lomnitz's new memoir, Nuestra América: My Family in the Vertigo of Translation,' was mentioned in this week's New Yorker, as part of the 'Briefly Noted' section. Lomnitz's memoir has been receiving broad critical acclaim, and has been the subject of several talks and conversations: at the Harvard University Bookstore, with Jean Comaroff; at the Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, with Jesús Velasco; and at Skylight Books in LA, with Graciela Montaldo. 

On Wednesday, February 24, Claudio Lomnitz will be in conversation with Claire Messud at the Brooklyn Public Library. You can also hear Claudio speak about his book on the radio program, 'Write the Book.' An interview with the LA Review of Books will air on Friday, February 26.

 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli has published her graphic memoir The Inheritance with Duke University Press. "In her graphic memoir... Povinelli explores the events, traumas, and powers that divide and define our individual and collective pasts and futures. Weaving together stories of her grandparents' flight from their village in the early twentieth century to the fortunes of their knife-grinding business in Buffalo, New York, and her own Catholic childhood in a shrinking Louisiana woodlands of the 1960s and 1970s, Povinelli describes the serial patterns of violence, dislocation, racism and structural inequality that have shaped not only her life but the American story." 

It has been reviewed by Kirkus, which can be found here.

PhD candidate in the Anthropology department, and cohost of the Black feminist anthropology podcast Zora's Daughters, Alyssa A.L. James, was interviewed by Columbia's Center for the Study of Social Difference's podcast, Just Three. Alyssa, along with cohost Brendane Tyne are the recent recipients of Columbia's Racial Justice Mini- Grant for their work on their podcast. Find a transcript and listen to the podcast on the CSSD's website, here

It is also available on on Google, on Apple, and Spotify

“It’s an extraordinary honor to have had my work selected for inclusion in this year’s Berlinale Forum Expanded.