Professor Talal Asad's book, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, and Modernity was published in Spring 2003 by Stanford University Press.

Professor Emeritus Daniel G. Bates is the co-author (with Elliot M. Fratkin) of Cultural Anthropology, published in 2003 by Allyn and Bacon (Boston).

John Jay College Professor Kirk Dombrowski (CUNY PhD 1998) is the author of Against Culture: Development, Politics, and Religion in Indian Alaska, 2001, part of the Fourth World Rising Series edited by Professor Gerald Sider and Professor Dombrowski, published by the University of Nebraska Press

Professor Edgar Gregerson was awarded Emeritus status by Queens College.

Affiliate Professor Jeffrey Laitman was appointed Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. He is, in addition, the director of the Center for Anatomy and Functional Morphology at Mt. Sinai.

Professor Susan Lees and Professor Fran Mascia-Lees of Sarah Lawrence College are the Editors-in-Chief of American Anthropologist. They can be reached at AAeditor@aaanet.com for questions about the journal. They welcome input on content, organization, special topics, and any other suggestions readers may have.

Professor Tom McGovern, Archaeology Subfield chair, reports that "thanks to lots of collaborative work over the past decade, our team this year has developed a pretty convincing case for who started the dried cod trade in the North Atlantic." Dried cod was "one of the very first products to become a commodity--borrowed against, futures trading, cod wars, etc., and arguably one of the first engines of the late medieval economic expansion. I think we now know where this came from and who started it all off--what the National Science Foundation calls a major finding." ♦ Professor McGovern also announces a three-year NSF research grant in the amount of $200,000 to continue work in Iceland and the Faroes, as well as a United Kingdom Leverhulme Trust grant in the amount of $180,000 "which is employing our students and aiding their travel. One Graduate Center student spent three months in Scotland learning to do soil micromorphology." ♦ As Principal Investigator, Professor McGovern was awarded a 2003-2004 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the project "The Development of Fishing and Fishing Communities in the Northwest of Iceland: Labor, Nature and Social Change in a Medieval Society." PhD Program student Ragnar Edvardsson was a co-researcher on the project.

Congratulations to Professor Emerita June Nash on being named recipient of the 2004 Kalman Silvert Award from the Latin American Studies Association. The award, the Association's highest, is named for LASA's first president and is offered every eighteen months to an eminent senior scholar for distinguished lifetime contributions to the study of Latin America. The award will be presented to Professor Nash at a luncheon in her honor on October 8, 2004.

Professor John Oates was the recipient of a grant from the Wildlife Conservation Society to establish a long-term biodiversity research program for the Society in southeastern Nigeria. The focus of the study is endangered forest primates, including gorillas. Professor Oates and Anthony Bassey of the Nigerian Conservation Society are co-directors of the program. Additional funding through USAID funds will support gorilla studies in Nigeria and in adjacent areas of Cameroon, where Professor Oates serves as an adviser.

Professors Jane Schneider and Ida Susser co-edited Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World (Berg Publishers, 2003). Among the book's contributors are David Harvey, writing on the concept of body politic as applied to cities, Leith Mullings, writing on Harlem, Donald Robotham on Jamaica, Jeff Maskovsky on Philadelphia, and Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider on Palermo. Alumni of the Anthropology Program are represented as well, with essays by Aseel Sawalha on Beirut, Suhong Chae on Ho Chi Minh City, Ara Wilson on Bangkok, and Carol Meyers (ABD) on Xalapa.

Professor Gerald Sider published Between History and Tomorrow: Making and Breaking Everyday Life in Rural Newfoundland (Broadview Press Encore Editions, 2003). ♦ He was one of two keynote speakers at the conference on Order, Violence, and Exclusion sponsored by the Danish Institute of International Studies in Denmark in September 2004. He discussed his recent work on Labrador Innu and Inuit child suicide and substance abuse. ♦ Professor Sider was also the keynote speaker at the Australian Anthropological Association meetings in October 2003 and at the Canadian Anthropological meetings in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in May 2003. He spoke on Native Americans. ♦ He is Co-editor, with John Jay College faculty member Kirk Dombrowski, of a series of ethnographic case studies of native political struggles, Fourth World Rising: Native People's Necessary and Chosen Struggles (University of Nebraska Press). The first two manuscripts were published in 2001.

Professor Sara Stinson is the editor of the Yearbook of Physical Anthropology.

Professor Ida Susser was named President-Elect of the American Ethnological Society, a two-year term which began in November 2003. She will serve as President of the Society from 2005-2007. ♦ Profesor Susser and Queens College faculty member Jeff Maskovsky received a grant from Wenner Gren for the conference "Rethinking the U.S. State," held October 8-10, 2004. ♦ She is the co-recipient, with Richard Parker, of a five-year grant from the National Institute of Health at the HIV Center and University of Kwazulu-Natal "Partnership in Ethnographic Training for Research in HIV." The grant is for training and research around community mobilization issues, gender and HIV in South Africa. It is the only anthropology grant the NIH has given for this topic. ♦ Professor Susser conducted a Skills Training Workshop ("Ethnographic Research Methods for the Study of Gender and HIV") at the International AIDS Conference in Bangkok, Thailand, in July 2004. The workshop was co-sponsored by UNIFEM and other international women's rights groups. It was one of 80 workshops accepted from 700 submitted and the only workshop to address anthropological issues. ♦ The March 2004 issue [24(1)] of Critique of Anthropology contains an introduction by Susser, "An Anthropological Take on the Aftermath of 9/11, in New York City." The issue is composed entirely of essays by PhD Program in Anthropology graduate students and graduate students from Teacher's College. Graduate Center student contributors are Julian Brash and co-authors Molly Hurley and James Trimarco. ♦ Professor Susser was the recipient of two fellowships in 2003, one from the National Endowment for the Humanities (a University Research fellowship) and the other from the National Institutes of Health (a Research Fellowship titled "From the Cosmopolitan to the Personal: Cultural Conceptions of Gender and Sexuality in the Battle against HIV/AIDS"). ♦ She is the editor of The Castells Reader of Cities and Social Theory by Manuel Castells (Blackwell Publishers, 2002).

Professor Diana Wall's newest book, Touring Gotham's Archaeological Past: Eight Self-Guided Walking Tours through New York City, co-authored by Anne-Marie Cantwell, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2004. ♦ Professor Wall was the winner of a book award from the Society for American Archaeology for Unearthing Gotham: The Archaeology of New York City, cowritten with Anne-Marie Cantwell (Yale University Press, 2001). The award is given for a book aimed at a popular audience. "The authors pursue New York City as a single archaeological site viewed through time," wrote the awards committee. "The city is made to come alive in this engaging and open narrative of the life history of a city."