Faculty Publications

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

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

Dr. Ismael García Colón (PhD University of Connecticut, 2002) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the College of Staten Island. He is a historical and political anthropologist with interests in political economy, oral history, and Caribbean, Latin American and Latina/o studies. His ethnographic work include documenting Puerto Rican and Latino labor history in the New York and interviewing former landless workers in Puerto Rico for more than a decade. His research explores how development policies formed and transformed modern subjectivities in Puerto Rico during mid-twentieth century. García Colón is the author of Land Reform in Puerto Rico: Modernizing the Colonial State, 1941-1969 (University Press of Florida, 2009). His publications have also appeared in Latin American Perspectives, CENTRO Journal, and Latino Studies. He is currently conducting a study of the Puerto Rican experience in U.S. farm labor (1940s-present), and its relation to the formation of the colonial state in Puerto Rico. García Colón was recently promoted to Associate Professor effective in January 2011.

Dr. Victor M. Torres-Velez (Ph.D. Michigan State, 2007), is an Assistant Professor at the Hunter College Department of Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino Studies. His degree is 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.

Dr. Mark Schuller (Ph.D. 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.

Dr. Omri Elisha (Ph.D. New York University, 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. Ruchi Chaturvedi (Ph.D. 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 (Ph.D. 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. Yukiko Koga (Ph.D. Columbia University 2008; Assistant Professor) Political economy, historical anthropology, legal anthropology, urban space, colonial inheritance, post-colonial & post-imperial relations, history & memory, transnational East Asia (China and Japan).

 




Dr. Anthony Marcus (Ph.D. The Graduate Center, 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. Stephanie Rupp (Ph.D. 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. Patricia Tovar (Ph.D. The Graduate Center, CUNY, 1995) was appointed to the Department of Anthropology, John Jay College, starting in September 2008. Her dissertation was titled “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.

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.

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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."