Austin Lord

Austin Lord is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology whose  research examines the lived experience of disaster and aftermath, questions of time and temporality, political ecologies of the water-energy nexus, infrastructural politics, the impacts of climate change and climate science, and the construction of environmental knowledge and socioenvironmental uncertainty in the Himalayan region. 

Austin's dissertation research focuses on the afterlives of disaster in the Langtang Valley…

Liam Lawson

Austin Kramer

Anastasia Kotsoglou

Anastasia Kotsoglou is an archaeologist with a primary focus on Mesoamerica and the ancient Maya. She is a Field Director affiliated with an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Programme for Belize Archaeological Project where she also teaches field methods. Her doctoral work investigates human-landscape interactions, and how strategies of social maintenance manifest at times of sociopolitical and ecological stress during the Late/Terminal Classic period.
She employs various multiscalar…

Oradi Inkhong

Oradi Inkhong is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Cornell University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of ethnomusicology, diaspora studies, and Southeast Asian studies. Her dissertation research explores the making of diasporic music by ethnic Shan migrants living in Thailand. She conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and Shan State, Myanmar to understand the role of music in constructing and redefining the meaning of “home(s)” as a crucial component of Shan…

Sampreety Gurung

Alexandra Dalferro

Alexandra Dalferro is a PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology. Her
research focuses on the politics, practices, and history of silk
production in Thailand, particularly among Khmer communities in Surin
Province.
She is interested in how knowledge and identity claims are fashioned
and contested through material processes, and she foregrounds silk's
"shimmering surfaces" to think about the affective and sensory
dimensions of weaving and sericulture.
Before coming to Cornell, Alexandra lived…

Amy Cromartie

Amy is an environmental archaeologist who focuses on human environmental landscape interactions in mountain zones. Trained as an archaeobotanist and paleoecologist, Amy combines macrobotanical, microbotanical, and molecular biomarkers, from lake and archaeological sediment with statistical models to reconstruct the climate and vegetation history of the Holocene in the Southern Caucasus.

Her research focuses on how social and political structures in mountain regions adapt to and enact change on…

Elif Sari

Elif Sari is a PhD student in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at Cornell University. Her research interests include gender, sexuality, borders, immigration, asylum, and humanitarianism in the Middle East. She received her bachelor's degree in Political Sciences and International Relations at Boğaziçi University in Turkey, and her master's degree in Near Eastern Studies at New York University, where she studied the intersections on sexuality, law, and violence by examining LGBTQ asylum in Turkey.…

Can Dalyan

Laura Cocora

Dambar Chemjong

Michael Carpentier

Charis Boke

Boke's ethnographic research is informed by her work as an engaged scholar and activist. As such, her approach to conducting research—as much as to teaching—is grounded in efforts to link theoretical content with practical engagement. As a community organizer she creates social-scientifically informed workshops on environmental health, anti-racist work, and herbal medicine-- practices through which she has built tools for scholarly public engagement.  Her current research project is focused on…

Rebekah Ciribassi

Rebekah Ciribassi is a PhD Candidate at Cornell University Department of Anthropology, with a concentration in Science and Technology Studies. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist with a particular interest in the circulation of biomedical technologies in East Africa. Her research is attentive to genetic medicine and other forms of biomedical science as enmeshed in and actively co-productive of political, sensory, and social practice.

During a joint MA/MPH program in Anthropology and…

Paul Nadasdy

I have been conducting ethnographic research in Canada’s Yukon Territory since 1995, principally with the people of Kluane First Nation, the indigenous inhabitants of the southwest Yukon. My research has focused on the politics surrounding the production and use of environmental knowledge in wildlife management, land claim negotiations, and other political arenas. Currently, I am conducting a sociocultural analysis of land claim negotiations among the governments of Canada, the Yukon Territory, and the Kluane First Nation. By examining the different cultural assumptions that various participants bring to the negotiating table, the resulting cross-cultural interactions, and how these articulate with the broader political, historical and legal contexts in which the negotiations are embedded, I hope to understand and describe the micro-level mechanisms through which unequal power relations are realized, reinforced, and at times subverted.

Gabrielle Borenstein

Gabrielle came to Cornell after earning her BA in anthropology and religion from Barnard College, Columbia University. Her graduate research explores how the material world -- objects, representational media, constructed landscapes -- influence social, religious, and political life. She is interested in the relationship between the elements of daily life such as labor, production, or ritual and the formation of ideology. Her graduate work explores this in the context of Bronze Age communities…

Jason Blaesing

Sena Aydin

Sena started her PhD training at Cornell after earning her BA in anthropology and economics at University of Virginia and her MA in social anthropology/ethnology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. She is interested in dynamics of urban governance, society, capital, and infrastructure. Her dissertation research explores everyday and institutional tensions of urban municipal governance in relation to a participatory urban transformation project in a peripheral neighborhood of the…

Viranjini P Munasinghe

I am an historical anthropologist working in the Caribbean (Trinidad) and the Asian Diaspora in the Americas. My initial research focused on the relation between ethnicity and nationalism and the politics of exclusion in nation building projects. My research specifically focuses on Indo Caribbeans who were brought as indentured labor to the New World when slavery was abolished in the British Caribbean. The New World context of the Caribbean allow for intriguing formulations of modernity and nationalism. I am particularly interested in a comparative understanding of how narratives of mixture, like creolization or multiculturalism operate to exclude citizens from the nation despite their overt promise of inclusion. Theoretically, I am also interested in epistemological issues having to do with the articulation of certain theoretical concepts like race, ethnicity and nation with their lay and political discursive forms and the implications of such entanglements for disciplines, theory and politics. My current research explores how nations are constituted through projects of comparison in different empirical settings that include the Americas and Asia.

Hirokazu Miyazaki

My recent work has been driven by a very simple question: how do we keep hope alive? I am interested in this question because of ongoing efforts to claim and even instrumentalize the category of hope in a wide spectrum of genres of knowledge from psychotherapy to conservative and progressive political thought. I have investigated the question in two radically different field sites, a peri-urban village in Suva, Fiji and a trading room of a major Japanese securities firm in Tokyo.