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Applications now open for Klarman postdoc fellowships in A&S

Applications are now being accepted for the third cohort of the Klarman Postdoctoral Fellowships program in the College of Arts and Sciences. The deadline for submission is Oct. 15.

Researchers reveal new suicide prevention tools from survivors

“We wanted to know what strategies have helped people live, and live well, through chronic suicidal behavior."

Hayden Kantor

I'm a sociocultural anthropologist researching the relationship between capitalism, food, and ethics in South Asia. I received my Ph.D. from Cornell's Department of Anthropology in May 2016. My dissertation, “‘We Earn Less than We Eat:’ Food, Farming, and the Caring Family in Bihar, India,” examined food and farming practices to show how rural people in the North Indian state of Bihar articulate an ethics of care in the face of precarious conditions. The Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Institute for Indian Studies funded 16 months of archival and ethnographic research. The title quote points to a shifting calculus in rural households in which well-being is framed not in terms of agricultural output, but off-farm income. I argue that even as they prepare for a future beyond agriculture and migrate beyond the village, they uphold an ethos of resourcefulness that they consider a defining characteristic of rural Bihar, and one essential for caring for the family. Currently, I am working on turning my dissertation into a book. Meanwhile, my next project will extend my exploration of food ethics through an ethnography of Indian food companies offering farm-to-table foods for a market of urban, middle-class consumers.

/hayden-kantor

Andrew C. Willford

Andrew Willford is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. Willford's work characteristically explores psychological and phenomenological aspects of selfhood, identity, and subjectivity within a matrix of power and statecraft. His previous research has focused upon Tamil displacement, revivalism, and identity politics in Malaysia and India. A recent book, Tamils and the Haunting of Justice: History and Recognition in Malaysia’s Plantations (University of Hawaii Press/Singapore University Press, 2014) examines how Tamil plantation communities face the uncertainties of retrenchment and relocation in Malaysia. His latest book, The Future ofBangalore’s Cosmopolitan Pasts: Civility and Differencein a Global City(University of Hawaii, 2018) examines the politics of language, religion, identity, and belonging in Bangalore, India, over a 20 year period. His current research focuses upon mental health, psychiatry, neurology, and religious healing traditions in North America and India. In 2014-15, he was a Fulbright Senior Research Fellow at NIMHANS (the National Institute for Mental Health and Neuro Sciences) in Bangalore, where he conducted research on urban psychiatry in Bangalore, as well as faith healing traditions within indigenous communities located in the Nilgiris Biosphere Reserve. Willford is a member of the core team of Cornell faculty teaching and researching within the Cornell-Keystone Nilgiris Field Learning Center in Tamil Nadu, India. Other recent books include: Cage of Freedom: Tamil Identity and the Ethnic Fetish in Malaysia (University of Michigan Press, 2006; Singapore University Press, 2007), Spirited Politics: Religion and Public Life in Contemporary Southeast Asia, Andrew Willford and Kenneth George, eds. (Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2005), and Clio/Anthropos: Exploring the Boundaries between History and Anthropology, Andrew Willford and Eric Tagliacozzo, eds. (Stanford University Press, 2009).

/andrew-c-willford

Marina Welker

My research interests include Southeast Asia, capitalism, commodities, corporations, international development, extractive industries, and tobacco.

/marina-welker

Thomas Peter Volman

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Sofia A. Villenas

Anthropology provides a key lens for the study of the politics and practice of education in everyday life. I am interested in how people teach and learn across home, school and community contexts, and how difference is constituted and made consequential in these endeavors. Importantly, I consider education as the practice of imagination, freedom and social change.

/sofia-villenas

Matthew Velasco

I am an anthropological bioarchaeologist who studies ancient populations of the Peruvian Andes through the analysis of their skeletal remains. My research explores the emergence of novel ethnic identities and cultural traditions during the era preceding and encompassing Inka imperial expansion in the 15th century. To explore how these dynamic social transformations impacted the lived experience of the body and its treatment at death, I analyze and interpret indicators of social identity, biological relatedness, diet, and health status written on the human skeleton.

/matthew-velasco

Yohko Tsuji

Moving from Japan to America made me keenly aware of cultural differences. As a result, I studied anthropology to explore what is culture and what role culture plays in our lives. I carried out major research in the US and Japan and also conducted fieldwork in Thailand, Taiwan, and China.

/yohko-tsuji

Adam T. Smith

The central preoccupation of my research and writing is the role that the material world—everyday objects, representational media, natural and built landscapes—plays in our political lives. Our social worlds, from the ancient past to the modern present, are forged upon a dense thicket of objects, from the spaces and places we move through to the plethora of things that orbit around us. Yet rarely do we pause to understand how this material world has shaped our political procedures and values. This neglect is particularly surprising since at root, the two dominant political traditions of the modern era—liberalism and socialism—are as concerned to define our relations to things (or at least to property in the abstract) as they are to describe our ties to one another as fellow citizens. The canny recognition that in order to reshape the political community we must start by remolding our ties to the tangible world around us hints at, but does not explain, the depth of our entanglement with material culture. How did we arrive at this intimate relationship with a material world that in the last two centuries has attained unprecedented ubiquity and complexity? And what are the implications of this avowedly archaeological view of the polity for the way we understand the principles and priorities of political association? These are the primary questions that thread through my scholarship and my current research seeks to advance this broad project in theoretical, historical, and empirical terms.

/adam-t-smith

Luisa Cortesi

Luisa Cortesi (PhD, Yale) is an environmental anthropologist who works on water, disasters, knowledge, technologies, and environmental justice. Her research focuses mainly in North Bihar, India, where she coordinated an innovative network of NGOs in the flood-affected area during the 2007 and the 2008 disastrous inundations, conducted ethnographic fieldwork for over three years in 2012-2015, and where she remains engaged in pro-bono advising to local NGOs.

/luisa-cortesi

Jessica Cooper

Jessica Cooper is the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology and School of Law at Cornell University and a member of the Society of Cornell Fellows. Working at the intersection of medical, legal, and political anthropology, Jessica’s research and teaching engages questions of poverty, race, and inequality; affect, care, and ethics; madness, psychoanalysis, and critical psychiatry; liberalism, punishment, and the state; critical theory; and ethnographic methods and modes of representation. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork at sites of criminal justice reform, public health clinics, and homeless encampments in the San Francisco Bay Area, Jessica's research explores connections between systems of inequality, care, and social justice. Rather than rely on structural explanations for persistent racism and poverty in the United States, Jessica examines how intimate socialities manage to refract, reify, and also refuse coordinates of broader systems of social inequality. Her first book project, Unaccountable: Surreal Life in California’s Mental Health Courts, reveals the ways in which relationships between criminal justice professionals and their clients unravel state power by inhabiting care as an alternative to the individualizing discourse of liberal responsibility. Drawing on observations of and participation in relationships among staff, clients, and clients' families in mental health courts, Unaccountable explores emergent ethics elicited by the demand to provide care for mentally ill individuals as a project of social justice amidst absent state services and vast material inequalities. Jessica has published recent work in Cultural Anthropology and Social Justice. Jessica’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Society for Psychological Anthropology/Lemelson Foundation, and the Center for Health and Wellbeing and Program in American Studies at Princeton University.

/jessica-cooper

Dana Bardolph

I am an anthropological archaeologist whose research interests include political ecology, culture contact, foodways, and identity studies, which I approach through the lens of paleoethnobotany. I received my Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2017 and am in the second year of my appointment as the Hirsch Postdoctoral Associate in the Cornell Institute for Archaeology and Material Studies (CIAMS). My archaeological research broadly revolves around the interaction between people and their environments through the lens of food-related activities. I employ a comparative, cross-cultural approach and have conducted field and laboratory research in multiple regions, including the Midwestern United States, Peru, Mexico, and the Caribbean, to examine the sociopolitical dynamics that underpin human-ecological interactions in New World agricultural societies, and I relate those interactions to issues of gender, labor, and identity in the ancient world. In addition to my archaeological research, I am interested in ethical issues in contemporary practice, including gender equity in academic representation and publication.

/dana-bardolph

Davydd Greenwood

An anthropologist focused on the anthropology of organizations (manufacturing and service) with a special interest in higher education reform, Greenwood is an expert in the field of action research with a 50-year history of work in various parts of Spain on issues as diverse as rural exodus, ethnic conflict, industrial cooperatives, participatory community development, and the role of governmental institutions in shaping and exacerbating identity politics and conflicts. He has done more than 3 years of action research work with the cooperatives of Mondragón in the Spanish Basque Country. He has also participated in a variety of international PhD programs in action research, most notably in Norway as part of the Norwegian industrial democracy movement. He has also done participatory community development work in de-industrialized towns in Upstate New York and in Spain's La Mancha region and a variety of action research projects to reform higher education programs. He recently served on the faculty of the European Union project Universities in the Knowledge Economy directed by Professor Susan Wright of Aarhus University, Denmark. He a Corresponding Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences and a member of the Board of Directors of the Evolution institute.

/davydd-greenwood

Meredith Small

Meredith F. Small was trained as a primate behaviorist and spent many years observing various species of macaques in captivity and in the wild. Her primatology focused on female mating behavior, alloparental care, and biological and physiological measure of reproductive success. Today, Dr. Small is interesting in the intersection of biology and culture and the evolution of human behavior. For the past few years she has focused on how biology and culture influence parenting styles. Although Dr. Small has published widely in academic journals, she currently works most often with the popular media. She is the author of four trade books, and she is a regular contributor for Discover, Natural History Magazine, Scientific American, and New Scientist, among others. Her articles cover a wide range of topic from chimpanzee hunting to family structure among the Bari of Venezuela. Small is also a commentator for National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."

/meredith-small

Billie Jean Isbell

I served as the director of the Andean program for Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development from 1990 until 2002.

/billie-jean-isbell

Annelise Riles

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Vilma Santiago-Irizarry

My research has focused on the unintended consequences, paradoxes, and contradictions generated in the articulation and deployment of ethnoracial identity constructs, particularly in the United States and in institutional settings, where they are applied toward the reproduction of structures of inequality. Before coming to Cornell, I taught in the Puerto Rican Studies Department at CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice. I have also done extensive field research on arts education, mental health and medical issues, and on substance abuse prevention programs in schools, penal institutions, and community-based organizations, particularly in New York City, as well as ethnohistorical research on the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, focusing on Puerto Rico and Cuba, and thus involving issues of colonialism and nationalism. An ethnohistorical pet project involves the exportation of Puerto Rican students to Federal Indian Schools at the turn of the 20th century. My other research interests and areas of expertise include language, law, field methods, and institutional culture. I am currently engaged in archival and legal research on language rights, ideologies, and practices, which will potentially lead, among other possibilities, to a critical ethnographic examination of translation and interpretation in the US federal court system. I hold a Certificate in Dance and Movement Analysis from the Laban Centre (formerly affiliated with Goldsmith's College, University of London) and a JD from the University of Puerto Rico Law School. I practiced public interest law for eleven years in Puerto Rico, including both criminal trial practice and civil rights litigation, and danced professionally for much of that time. Beginning with my time in law, I have actively sought professional service, which I consider a significant (yet much neglected) dimension of our institutional obligations, and have occupied multiple positions in a variety of professional organizations, from the Puerto Rico Bar Association to the American Anthropological Association.

/vilma-santiago-irizarry

Denise Green

Denise Nicole Green is an AssociateProfessor in the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design and Director of theCornell Fashion +Textile Collection(CF+TC). Professor Green's research uses ethnography, video production, archival methods, and curatorial practice to explore production of fashion, textiles, identities, and visual design. She is also a faculty member inAmerican Indian and Indigenous Studies Program,theCornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and theAmerican Studies Program, as well as a graduate field member in theDepartment of Anthropologyat Cornell.

/denise-green

Paul Steven Sangren

Professor Sangren is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on Taiwan and China.His earliest published work combines insights drawn from structuralist theory with practice-oriented critiques to illuminate Chinese ritual processes and cosmological symbols.History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (Stanford), argues that notions of magical power (靈ling) attributed to supernatural entities embody an implicit ideology of social production and an explicit modality of local historical experience.Chinese Sociologics (Athlone) extends this earlier work's primarily Marxian and Durkheimian focus on collective institutions and representations to accommodate individual agency and desire -- particularly in the arena of Chinese family and gender.Linking individual experience to social processes, the book argues that symbolic alienation – representations that invert the relations between producers and products -- plays an important role in constituting a culturally particular mode of production of desire.His current project, tentatively entitled Filial Obsessions, is a broadly framed analysis and critique of Chinese patriliny, mythic narrative, and gender ideology informed by a synthesis of Marxian and psychoanalytic perspectives.

/paul-steven-sangren

Jane Fajans

My long term research has been in Papua New Guinea with the Baining of East New Britain Province. My interests originally focused on ritual and socialization, but I have also examined aspects of personhood, emotion, identity, and value. In analyzing my Baining material, I have been fascinated by the role that food has played in many aspects of Baining social and cultural processes, and in particular on the process of adoption which is so important in their society. My interest in food originated in this ethnographic context but has expanded through teaching and reading.

/jane-fajans

Nerissa Russell

I am a zooarchaeologist working primarily at Neolithic sites in southeast Europe and in Anatolia. I spent many years at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, as co-director of the zooarchaeology lab.

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Marcos Ramos Valdés

Marcos Ramos Valdés is a doctoral student in archaeological anthropology. Marcos came to Cornell after acquiring his B.A. with a double major in Anthropology and Political Science and his M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Florida. In addition, Marcos received a certificate in Tropical Conservation and Development from the same institution. Marcos hails from the magnificent metropolis of La Habana, Cuba, and as a Cuban, Marcos is intimately interested in the culture and history of Latin America and its people.

/marcos-ramos-valdes

Ranya Perez

Ranya Perez is a Ph.D. student in socio-cultural anthropology. She is interested in exploring the relationship between community gardens/farms and solidarity. Her work seeks to understand what occurs when traditionally place-based modes of belonging, solidarity, and sovereignty transform as they travel through transnational networks. She looks at how place—and therefore sovereignty—is not only about land but also about relationships that can be fostered both across and within borders,…

/ranya-perez

Karina Edouard

Karina Edouard (she/they) is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her research is situated at the interstices of medical anthropology, Black feminist health science studies, and political philosophy. Karina’s current research project examines the ways immigration status—in addition to race, gender, and class—informs Black immigrant women’s birthing experiences.

Karina is a certified perinatal loss doula and is currently completing certification training…

/karina-edouard