Faculty Publications

Faculty News: New and Recent Faculty Hires at The Graduate Center and CUNY Anthropology Departments

Central Line Graduate Center Appointments

Dr. Fernando Coronil (Ph.D.University of Chicago 1987) is now a full time faculty member. He has conducted many years of research in Latin Area, in particular Venezuela. His research focuses on contemporary historical transformations in Latin America and on theoretical issues concerning the state, modernity, and postcolonialism. His numerous publications include The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela; "Beyond Occidental ism: Towards Non-Imperial Geohistorical Categories"; and the introductory essay in Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, by Fernando Ortiz. Professor's Coronil's first book, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (University of Chicago Press, 1997), won wid e acclaim for its study of Venezuela's transformation into a dominant economic, institutional and political force. The book draws on cultural anthropology, historical sociology, and political economy. He, along with Julie Skurski, are editors of States of Violence (University of Michigan 2006). This extraordinary collection of essays recasts prevailing understandings of the often unrecognized role of violence in the formation of the modern world. He is currently working on a project entitled “Political Transformation in Venezuela” that is based around a series of eve nts, most notably, the coup d'etat and subsequent reinstatement of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002. In Fall 2004, Coronil was the Cisneros Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Professor Coronil, a Venezuelan citizen, comes to the Graduate Center from the University of Michigan, where he is a member of the Anthropology and History Departments, and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program. (posted January 2008).

Professor Katherine Verdery (Ph.D. Stanford University) joined the faculty in fall 2005.She came to The Graduate Center from the University of Michigan, where she was Eric R. Wolf Collegiate Professor of Anthropology. Prior to that she spent twenty years teaching at Johns Hopkins University. She has conducted multiple field projects in Romania, investigating such themes as ethnic relations, nationalism, the transformation of socialist systems, and the changes in agricultural property relations. She is the author of The Vanishing Hectare; The Political Lives of Dead Bodies; What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?; National Ideology Under Socialism; and Transylvanian Villagers. The recipient of numerous grants, including two from the National Science Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship, she is currently at the Russell Sage Foundation, co-authoring a study on the collectivization of agriculture in 1950s Romania. Professor Verdery is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, serves on the executive board of the Social Science Research Council, and is a past member of the American Anthropological Association's board of directors.

New and Recent Appointments to The Graduate Center Anthropology Doctoral Faculty from other CUNY Colleges

Dr. Jacqueline Nassy Brown (PhD Stanford) joined the Hunter College Department of Anthropology in Fall 2002. Her interests include racial formation; national and diasporic identities; gender, space, and place; transnationalism; Britain. She has conducted extensive ethnographic research with Black residents of Liverpool, England. Her essays concerning the politics of race, gender, Diaspora, and locality in Liverpool have appeared in Cultural Anthropology and American Ethnologist. She is currently completing a book entitled Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race and Identity in the Port City of Liverpool, England.

Dr. John Collins (PhD U of Michigan, 2003) joined the cultural anthropology faculty at Queens College in Fall 2003. His research interests include Brazil and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, Andean Peru and Ecuador, nationalism and transnationalism, globalization and political economy, racial theory, social movements, urban anthropology, cultural and intellectual property, economic anthropology, anthropology and history, ethnography of the state, gender, cultural heritage, and Protestantism in Latin America.

Dr. Murphy Halliburton (PhD CUNY, 2000) has taught in the Queens College Department of Anthropology since Fall 2000. He specializes in medical anthropology and the history and culture of South Asia, and has conducted fieldwork on ayurvedic psychiatry, biomedical psychiatry and religious healing systems in South India. His other current and future research interests include anthropology of science and issues of pharmaceutical manufacturing in the global economy.


Dr. Mandana Limbert (PhD U Michigan, 2002) joined the Queens College Department of Anthropology in Fall 2002. Her specializations include the peoples and cultures of the Middle East, the anthropology of religion, and memory and culture. Her current project traces connections between Oman and East Africa, focusing on changes in marriage practices and notions of race in Oman and among Omanis in Zanzibar. Recent publications include "The Senses of Water in an Omani Town," in Social Text (Fall 2001) and a forthcoming article on Religious Knowledge, Gener and Education in Oman, in an Oxford University Press book edited by Paul Dresch and James Piscatori.

Dr. Jeff Maskovsky (PhD Temple, 2000) joined the Urban Studies department at Queens College in Fall 2002. He is a cultural anthropologist whose areas of of specialization include U.S. urban poverty, the anthropology of social movements, and globalization and inequality. He is co-editor of the New Poverty Studies: the Ethnography of Power, Politics and Impoverished People in the United States (NYU Press) and is currently at work on a book on poverty and politics in post-industrial Philadelphia. His most recent publications also include "The Anthropology of Welfare 'Reform': New Perspectives on U.S. Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era" (with Sandra Morgen) in Annual Review of Anthropology 32:315-338 2003.

Dr. Patricia D. Mathews-Salazar (Yale) has taught in the Social Science Department at the Borough of Manhattan Community College since 2000. Her dissertation looked at recent expressions of Indian resurgence in the in the highlands of Tucuman, northwest Argentina. Her interests include ethnicity, nationalism and citizenship, law, immigration and transnationalism, and anthropology and human rights.

Dr. Ekaterina (Kate) Pechenkina (PhD U Missouri - Columbia, 2002) joined the Queens College Department of Anthropology in Fall 2003. She is a bioarchaeologist with an interest in early complex societies. She has studied skeletal collections from Peru, Russia, and China. Most recently, her research was focused on the impact of population growth and dietary changes on community health in northern China during the Neolithic. She has developed statistical models that allow recognition of social, ethnic, or occupational heterogeneity in a population based on skeletal markers of stress and activity. Using this methodology, she is studying social/ethnic stratification in the Early Intermediate period on the Central Peruvian coast. Her findings indicate that health markers do not follow the grouping suggested by the funerary offerings. Instead, they correspond well to the type of cranial deformation, a possible ethnicity marker established during early childhood.

Dr. Timothy Pugh is an archaeologist in the Queens College Department of Anthropology specializing in Mesoamerica. His research explores ethnogenesis among the Late Postclassic to Colonial period (ca. AD 1250-1750) Maya of Peten, Guatemala. He has conducted research in Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Guam, and the Southeastern United States. Other interests include ritual, identity, architecture, complex societies, and research methods. He earned his PhD from Southern Illinois University in 2001.

Dr. Ryan L Raaum (PhD New York University, 2004) is a physical anthropologist. He joined the Lehman College Department of Anthropology in September 2007, and was appointed to the doctoral faculty in Spring 2008. His areas of specialization include: population genetics, human molecular variation, phylogeography, primate phylogenetics, molecular systematics; Africa, Middle East, Indian Ocean rim.

Dr. Alfred Rosenberger (PhD CUNY, 1979) joined the Department of Anthropology at Brooklyn College in Fall 2003. A physical anthropologist, he is a specialist on the evolution and systematics of New World monkeys.

Dr. Victoria Sanford (PhD Stanford, 2000) joined the Lehman College anthropology faculty in Fall 2004; during 2004-05 she was on leave with Fulbright and other support in Guatemala and Colombia. Her research focuses on collective memory, community reconstruction, human rights and international humanitarian law during internal armed conflicts and in post-conflict countries in Latin America and Africa. She has conducted extensive field research with Maya communities in Guatemala, with Afro-Colombian and indigenous peace communities in Colombia, and with Colombian refugees in Ecuador. She is the author of Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala (Palgrave Macmillan 2003), Violencia y Genocidio en Guatemala (FyG Editores 2003) and co-author of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation's report to the Commission for Historical Clarification (the Guatemalan truth commission). She has just completed La Masacre de Panzós: Etnicidad, tierra y violencia en Guatemala (FyG Editores) and Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy and Activism, co-edited with Asale Angel-Ajani (Rutgers University Press). She is currently writing Morality and Survival: Child Soldiers and Displacement in Guatemala and Colombia.

Dr. Jonathan Shannon received his PhD in 2001 from The Graduate Center and was hired in Fall 2001 at Hunter College. His dissertation, awarded the Malcolm H. Kerr Award by the Middle East Studies Association for best dissertation in the social sciences for 2001, examines contradictions and debates about modernity in contemporary Syria through an ethnographic analysis of music performance and aesthetics in the city of Aleppo. His research addresses concerns in ethnomusicology, aesthetics, postcolonial studies, emotion and sentiment, religion, and the body and the senses. At Hunter, Dr. Shannon teaches Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, History of Anthropological Theory, Ethnography of the Middle East, and the Anthropology of Music and the Arts.

Dr. Michael Steiper (PhD Harvard) joined the faculty in physical anthropology at Hunter College in Fall 2003. He is interested in genetic adaptations of humans and other primates. His dissertation research focused on testing for adaptive evolution at the globin genes of orangutans. This project had implications for understanding malaria's role in both ape and human evolution. His future research plans include examining genes involved in skeletal adaptations of humans and other primates, as well as continuing work on genes that confer resistance to malaria. His other interests include biogeography,phylogeny, and human genetic diversity.Visit the website for his new laboratory, the Anthropological Genetics Lab, at Hunter: maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/anthro/agl.html

New and Recent Tenure-track Assistant and Associate Professors Hired at other CUNY Colleges

Victor M. Torres-Velez, Hunter College Department of Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies, Assistant Professor, earned his PhD in 2007 in sociocultural and critical medical anthropology at Michigan State where he won the Outstanding Graduate Student Award in 2000. He has specialized in gender, justice, and environmental change; theories of social change; environmental sociology. Before joining Hunter, he was an assistant professor at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

Mark Schuller (PhD University of California, Santa Barbara, 2007) is an Assistant Professor in African American Studies and Anthropology at York College. In addition to understanding contemporary Haiti, Schuller's research contributes to globalization, NGOs, civil society, and development. APLA paper prize winner, Schuller has published five peer-reviewed articles and two book chapters about Haiti, in addition to several on-line articles in public media.

Omri Elisha (PhD NYU, 2005) has joined the Queens College Department of Anthropology as an Assistant Professor starting Fall 2009. He has been a Resident Scholar at the School for Advanced Research, and received research grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Louisville Institute. His research focuses on evangelical Christianity and faith-based activism in the US.  Recent publications include journal articles inCultural Anthropology and Social Analysis, and several editorials for mainstream scholarly websites such as The Revealer and The Immanent Frame.  He is currently completing a book based on fieldwork in East Tennessee exploring the moral ambitions of evangelical social engagement, which will be published in the Anthropology of Christianity series of University of California Press.

Dr. Alexander Bauer (PhD University of Pennsylvania, 2006) joined the Department of Anthropology, Queens College, in September 2008. He is an archaeologist with interests in material culture, semiotics, interaction and trade, cultural heritage law and policy, and Middle East, Eurasia.

Dr. Ruchi Chaturvedi (PhD Columbia University, 2007) is a cultural anthropologist who joined the Department of Anthropology, Hunter College in September, 2008. She also has a Masters and an M.Phil in Sociology from Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi . In 2006-07 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Peace and Conflict Studies program, Colgate University . Her research focuses on questions of political violence, popular political aspirations and their contentious relationship with the rules and institutions of India 's liberal democracy. It locates the democratic possibilities as well as the dangers to tenets of democracy posed by popular political practices and communities. This 20 research further examines how in response to political violence and other transgressive political practices, the rules and processes of law might themselves undo the democratic impulses of a liberal state. Dr. Chaturvedi's ethnographic work so far has revolved around the lifeworlds of local-level political workers of the Marxist Left and Hindu Right in Kerala, their acts and experiences of political violence, and the criminal trials that they subsequently went through. She is working on a book manuscript entitled Down by Law: Violence and the Work of Politics in Democratic Kerala , India.

Her second project is a multisited, comparative study of police and judicial responses to acts of everyday political violence, as well as its more dramatic and insurgent forms in regions of India with a significant minority presence – namely North Kerala, Bareilly district in Uttar Pradesh (with significant Muslim populations), and the Sikh-dominated state of Punjab. This research is located at the interface of political and legal anthropology, the anthropology of violence and human rights, theories of democracy and secularism, ethnographic practice, and South Asian studies.

Dr. Ignasi Clemente (PhD UCLA, 2005) is a linguistic anthropologist who joined the Department of Anthropology, Hunter College in September 2008. His areas of specialization are Linguistics, Culture and Communication, Gesture and Deixis. His dissertation investigates how pediatric cancer patients use both verbal and nonverbal communication to accept, resist or contest everyday treatment choices during different stages of their cancer treatment in a hospital in Barcelona, Catalonia. Specifically, he examines the embodied discursive practices through which children are either included or excluded from the treatment negotiation, as well as the embodied ways in which children actively attempt to participate in it.

Dr. Kenneth Guest (PhD CUNY, 2001) joined the cultural anthropology faculty at Baruch College as a tenure-track assistant professor in Fall 2003. His dissertation was "Walking on Water: Fuzhounese Immigrant Religious Communities in New York's Chinatown."

Dr. Anru Lee (PhD CUNY, 1999) joined the Anthropology Department faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Fall 2003. A cultural anthropologist, her research focuses on the Asian Pacific region and issues of capitalism, modernity, gender and sexuality, and urban anthropology. She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan's Economic Restructuring (SUNY Press 2004) and is co-editor of Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society (ME Sharpe, 2003). Her current project investigates rapid transit systems as related to issues of technology, governance, and citizenship. Her most recent fieldwork looks at the newly built Mass Rapid Transit systems in Taiwan in the context of the country's struggle for cultural and national identity.

Dr. Anthony Marcus (PhD CUNY) was appointed to the Department of Anthropology, John Jay College, starting September 2008. He lectures in anthropology and development studies and directs internet programs in International Development. He is an urban anthropologist with research interests in political economy, civil society, the anthropology of the state, poverty amelioration, public policy, gender, 'race' and ethnicity. He has done field research in Cuba, Mexico, and Guatemala, has worked on major longitudinal studies of homeless African-American and Latin American men in New York City, and heroin and illicit drug marketing and use in the United States. He recently became co-editor of the journal Dialectical Anthropology. He has published on globalization and culture change (Anthropology For A Small Planet NY: Brandywine Press 1996) and American history (On Trial: American History Through Court Proceedings and Hearings 1998), and his current writing focuses on Mexican migrants in the northeastern United States, poverty and public policy, the politics of the culture concept in development, and comparative mestizajes.

Dr. Jessica Rothman (PhD Cornell University, 2006) is a physical anthropologist. She joined the Hunter College Department of Anthropology in September, 2008. Her specialties include: Primates and their diets, Evolutionary Ecology, Nutrition, Africa, Uganda.

Dr. Stephanie Rupp (PhD Yale University, 2001) is a cultural anthropologist who joined the Department of Anthropology, Lehman College in Fall 2008. Her research focuses on the politics of categorization in Africa, examining the disjuncture between the fluidity of social categories and the rigidity of institutional categories, as well as how the institutional appropriation and manipulation of social categories may either exacerbate or attenuate conflict. In her current research, Dr. Rupp is examining engagements between Africa and China, bringing an ethnographic perspective to understanding relationships between Africans and Chinese entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers, with particular attention to perceptions, categories, and representations of these emerging relationships. She conducted her dissertation research on the formation and transformation of categories of identity in the Congo River Basin of central Africa. Rupp comes to CUNY from the National University of Singapore, where she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the University Scholars Programme. She is a Research Associate with the International Security Program and the Program on Intrastate Conflict at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Her recent publications include "Africa and China: Engaging Postcolonial Interdependencies" (Brookings Institution Press, 2008) and I, You, We, They: Forests of Identity in Southeastern Cameroon (University of Washington Press, forthcoming).

Dr. Christa Salamandra (Ph D Oxford, 2001) joined the anthropology faculty at Lehman College in Fall 2004. Her work focuses on expressive, visual and urban culture in the Arab Middle East. Her research among elite groups in Syria, focusing on debates surrounding the preservation, restoration and representation of the Old City of Damascus, forms the basis of her book, A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria (Indiana University Press, 2004). Her current fieldwork among Syrian cultural producers examines the recent expansion of the pan-Arab satellite television industry in a context of economic liberalization and regionalization.

She has also conducted ethnographic research and among Arab media, religious and cultural institutions in the United Kingdom, exploring the development of London-based industries to channel and spend Gulf Cooperation Council wealth. This work examines the role of London’s British and Arab intermediaries in the processes of cultural, financial, social and ideological gate keeping—and gate constructing. Dr. Salamandra has published a series of articles drawn from her research on Arab London: “Cultural Construction, the Gulf, and Arab London” in Paul Dresch and James Piscatori, eds., Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf. (I. B. Tauris, 2005); “London’s Arab Media and the Construction of Arabness”, Transnational Broadcasting Studies, Vol. 10, Spring 2003; and “Globalisation and Cultural Mediation: The Construction of Arabia in London”, Global Networks, Vol. 2(4), 2002.

Dr. Russell Leigh Sharman (PhD Oxford, 1999) joined the faculty in anthropology at Brooklyn College in Fall 2002. He has taught at several colleges in and around New York, including Brooklyn College, since 1999. His research interests include the cultural politics of race and ethnicity and the anthropology of art and aesthetics. His dissertation examines aesthetic practice among the African Diaspora in Puerto Limon, Costa Rica. The research demonstrates how aesthetics and art production intersect ethnic and gender identification through expressive forms such as painting, music, dance and literature. He also examines the creation of ethnic boundaries and alliances in an historical context, and the impact of internal and external migration on perceptions of race, class and nationalism. While continuing to work in Costa Rica, he also lives and works in East Harlem, New York, researching how art and cultural institutions mediate ethnic conflict.

Dr. Irina Carlota (Lotti) Silber (PhD NYU, 2000) was appointed to the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, City College/CUNY Center for Worker Education in Fall 2005. Her work explores postwar processes in one of El Salvador's former war zones and a region known for its peasant revolutionary participation. She documents what she terms the entangled aftermaths of war and displacement, aftermaths that have produced postwar deception and disillusionment. Her book, Revolutionaries on the Post-War Highway: Disillusionment in El Salavador (forthcoming, Rutgers University Press) unmasks how community members are asked contradictorily and in different contexts to relinquish their identities as "revolutionaries" and to develop a new sense of themselves as productive yet marginal postwar citizens via the same rubric of "participation" that fueled their revolutionary action. Specifically, she traces the lives of the rank and file members of this historic struggle for justice and reconstruction, following community members along their journey from revolutionary activists to postwar development recipients and ambivalent grassroots actors, to in many cases now undocumented migrants. It is this most recent shift to migration, under the "transition to democracy" that she finds the most compelling and that she theorizes as one of obligation.

Dr. Edward Snajdr (PhD U Pittsburgh) joined the faculty at John Jay College in Fall 2003. His research focuses on domestic violence, gender, and civil society in post-communist cultures. He is interested in applying anthropological perspectives in the fields of development, legal reform and criminology. He has conducted fieldwork in Slovakia funded by the Fulgright IIIE Program, the International Research and Exchanges Board and the National Science Foundation Anthropology Division and in Kazakhstan by the National Science Foundation Law and Social Science Program. From 1999 to 2003, Dr. Snajdr co-directed a U.S. State Department INL Domestic Violence Training Program for Law Enforcement in Kazakhstan. His publications have appeared in the journals Problems of Post-Communism, Crime and Justice International, and the edited volume Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (CEU Press 2001).

Dr. Karen Strassler recently joined the Department of Anthropology, Queens College. She is a cultural anthropologist who works in Southeast Asia.

Dr. Patricia Tovar was appointed to the Department of Anthropology, John Jay College, starting in September 2008. She earned her doctorate in anthropology from CUNY in 1995, with the dissertation “Tales of Love and death: The lives of Portuguese widows“. She was a MAGNET Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and the coordinator of the CUNY PIPELINE Program. She has been the recipient of a Wenner-Gren Foundation Fieldwork Grant, a Ledig House Writers Residency, and many other fellowhips and awards. Her research interests have focused on the study of widowhood, mobility, forced displacement, violence, sexual and reproductive health, and gender and science. She has conducted field work in Colombia, Portugal, Ecuador and the United States. She came to John Jay from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, and until 2006 she was the head of the Social Anthropology section of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History. Her recent publications include “Las viudas del conflicto armado en Colombia” and “Familia, género y Antropología en Colombia.” She has published extensively on the consequences of armed conflict on women’s lives, the impact of new reproductive technologies for women, the construction of medical discourses and cosmetic alterations of the female body, and on why women lag far behind men in science and technology. She is the co-chair of the Latin American Studies Association, and has been a consultant for the Organization of Iberoamerican States and the Panamanian Science and Technology Secretariat.

Dr. Shonna Trinch joined the Anthropology faculty at John Jay College in 2005. Professor Trinch is a sociolinguist and discourse analyst and her research has focused on narrative, institutional discourse, the intersection of lay and professional voices in the U.S. legal system, U.S. Spanish and U.S. Latino English. She has explored law and language issues in the contexts of rape and domestic violence. Her publications appear in journals such as Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Journal of Speech, Law and Language (formerly known as Forensic Linguistics) and Text. The research she conducted for her book, Latinas’ narratives of domestic abuse: Discrepant versions of violence (2003) was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. While she continues to write about language and gender-based crimes, Professor Trinch is also developing new programs of study. She is working on a book that will explore New York City’s linguistic landscape. And she and Edward Snajdr are designing a collaborative research project with John Jay students that will study redevelopment in New York City from the perspectives of cultural anthropology and sociolinguistics.

Dr. Alisse Waterston (PhD CUNY, 1990) joined the faculty at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Fall 2003. Her areas of specialty are urban poverty and policy issues in the U.S. related to destitution, homelessness and substance abuse, health, welfare and criminal justice; socio-cultural, political-economic and psychological aspects of displacement, diaspora and structural violence; inequality and its consequences; the production and consumption of traditional and new media. She is the author of Love, Sorrow and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence, and Street Addicts in the Political Economy (Temple University Press). Her service to anthropology includes five years as Section Editor for Anthropology News, co-Editor of North American Dialogue, a three-year term on the Long-Range Planning Committee of the AAA, and membership in the AAA Portal Implementation Working Group.

New and Recent Additions to the Affiliate/Associate Faculty, PhD Program in Anthropology

Professor Andrew Dugmore, an archaeologist from the Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Professor Kevin Edwards, an archaeologist from the Department of Geography and Environment, University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

Professor F. James Rohlf, a biometrician, from the Program of Ecology and Evolution in the Biological Sciences Department at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Professor Ian A. Simpson, an archaeologist from the Department of Environmental Science, University of Stirling, Scotland.

Dr. Orri Vésteinsson, an archaeologist from the Institute of Archaeology, Iceland.

Professor Peter M. Whiteley, Curator, Department of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York. Dr. Whiteley is a cultural anthropologist.

PhD Program in Anthropology - The CUNY Graduate Center
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This departmental publication supplements the official Bulletin of The Graduate School as well as the current Graduate Center Student Handbook and "Announcement of Courses."