Jennifer Sweeney Tookes earned her Phd with a dissertation on Rice and Peas in the Diaspora: Food, Health and the Body among Barbadian Migrants in Atlanta and is now an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Georgia Southern University.
The Anthropology Department is pleased to announce our 2021 student award winners! Please join us in congratulating undergraduates Isabella Cantor, Katherine Morgan, William Johnson, and Phoebe Einzig-Roth, and graduate students Elena Lesley and Luisa Rivera. Undergraduate awards were conferred at a virtual celebration on Monday, May 3.
2021 Undergraduate Student Awards
Outstanding Senior Award: Isabella Cantor and Katherine Morgan
Outstanding Junior Award: William Johnson
Marjorie Shostak Award for Excellence and Humanity in Ethnography
2021 Graduate Student Awards:
George Armelagos Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student: Elena Lesley and Luisa Rivera
For award descriptions and past winners, visit our Departmental Awards webpage.
Goodrich C. White Professor Emerita Peggy Barlett was recently honored during the Emory Office of Sustainability Initiative’s Virtual Earth Day Celebration with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Prof. Barlett has served on the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at Emory since 1976. In her tribute to Prof. Barlett, who retired in Summer 2020, Prof. Bobbi Patterson highlighted Prof. Barlett’s many contributions to Emory’s national leadership in campus sustainability, her service to students, and her numerous academic accomplishments.
From Professor Barlett’s innumerable contributions to the field and practice of sustainable food, her ignition of long-term commitments to sustainability among Emory faculty through her creation of the Piedmont Project, and her path-breaking leadership on behalf of women faculty at Emory, her impact has been immeasurable.
At the same event, Anthropology staff Eva Stotz was named Outstanding Sustainability Representative. Prof. Bobbi Patterson (Religion) and Prof. Eloise Carter (Biology – Oxford) were also honored with Sustainability Lifetime Achievement Awards. Videos of the event are available online.
Dr. Ozawa-de Silva published her research in Sage Journals along with her co-author Michelle Parsons.
Loneliness has been increasingly recognized as a public health issue rather than merely an individual psychological issue, as the appointment of the UK’s very first Minister of Loneliness in 2018 shows. In recent months, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted our need for social connection. Technology has allowed many of us to connect even when we are physically remote. Our need to connect with others is the very thing that creates the potential for loneliness. For this reason, loneliness should not be pathologized as a disorder, but rather seen as a natural expression of what it means to be a social being, born into and existing within a society. This does not mean that loneliness is experienced in the same way everywhere. As the papers in this special issue, “toward an anthropology of loneliness” amply illustrate, culture shapes expectations, experiences and expressions of loneliness.
Following this publication from 2020 is the Podcast on loneliness and the special issue Toward an Anthropology of Loneliness (Ozawa-de Silva and Parsons, 2020), Transcultural Psychiatry Podcast, 22, February.
Willen, associate professor at UConn, established the Pandemic Journaling Project along with Katherine Mason, Assistant Professor at Brown University. In addition to giving a voice to people from different areas and backgrounds, this project will create records of how people felt throughout this historic event. In the New York Times article Willen and Mason voice some of their early analysis.
The Department of Anthropology at Emory University (Atlanta, GA) invites applications for two tenure track positions in cultural anthropology to begin Fall 2021. We seek scholars at the rank of assistant or associate professor who address contemporary issues of pressing concern. Broadly speaking, our hiring focus will prioritize interest in and theoretical engagement with race, power, difference, and inequality, activist anthropology, ethics and humanitarianism, and social movements. We are particularly interested in anthropologists who work in one or more of the following areas (listed alphabetically): food insecurity and environment; gender and sexuality; migration, borders, and refugees; and well-being, health, and mental health.
Candidates should be willing and able to regularly teach general courses in cultural anthropology along with courses in their area of expertise both at undergraduate and graduate levels. They also should be willing to mentor undergraduate and graduate students. Candidates must have a doctoral degree, excellent research record, and a demonstrated commitment to teaching.
Applications should include cover letter, curriculum vita, research statement, teaching statement, a statement about teaching and mentorship of students of diverse backgrounds, and complete contact information for three references. The Department of Anthropology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, and Emory University embrace diversity and seek candidates who will participate in a climate that attracts students of all ethnicities, races, nationalities, genders, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. This search is part of an exciting new hiring initiative to diversify faculty across the College of Arts and Sciences with prominent hires in the consonant areas of African American Studies, Sociology, History, Philosophy, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
Review of applications will begin on November 1, and applications will be accepted through December 1, 2020. To apply for this position, please submit your materials free of charge through Interfolio: http://apply.interfolio.com/79206 .
Emory University is an equal employment opportunity and affirmative action employer. Women, non-binary individuals, minorities, people with disabilities and veterans are strongly encouraged to apply.
Anthropology faculty member Dr. Kristin Phillips has been named a co-winner of the 2020 Society for Economic Anthropology Book Prize for her 2018 book: An Ethnography of Hunger: Politics, Subsistence, and the Unpredictable Grace of the Sun (Indiana University Press). The award honors the best book in economic anthropology published during the last three years. Phillips shares this honor with Dr. Kathleen Millar of the University of British Columbia for her 2018 book: Reclaiming the Discarded: Life and Labor on Rio’s Garbage Dump (Duke University Press).
Peggy Barlett
Goodrich C. White Professor Emerita
Professor Barlett received her PhD from Columbia University in 1975 and joined Emory in 1976, where she became a founding member of the Department of Anthropology.
Bradd Shore
Goodrich C. White Professor Emeritus
Professor Shore received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1977 and joined Emory University in 1984 as Associate Professor of Anthropology.
Carol Worthman
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emerita
Professor Worthman received her PhD from Harvard University in 1978 and was appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Emory in 1986.
The #BlackEcologies series is a digital humanities project that Dr. Hosbey is co-editing on the Black Perspectives blog, the online home of the African American Intellectual History Society. #BlackEcologies brings together research from scholars in the humanities and social sciences that critically address the enduring legacies of racism by exploring the ways that Black diaspora communities experience environmental catastrophe. This multimodal project will feature essays, photo-essays, digital storytelling projects, as well as short documentaries. Our goal is to explore how Afro-descendant people work to resist ecocide – intellectually, politically, and in practice. The introductory page to the series can be found here.
What does it mean to produce scholarship through sound? The Experimental Ethnography at Emory working group just published a conversation on Mixtape Scholarship with Dr. Kwame M. Phillips (Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy; Emory Anthropology PhD 2014). Dr. Phillips and co-author Dr. Shana L.
Redmond’s essay/mixtape “The People Who Keep on Going”: A Listening Party, Vol. I appears in The Futures of Black Radicalism, which is being promoted this Summer as a free e-book by publisher Verso Books. The playlist “is a people’s songbook, a soundtrack to the improvisational life and living of Blackness under the control of white supremacy. This is an effort to pull forward and give a name to what our bodies tell us with every needle drop, to hold tight that which combines individual voice and people’s rebellion . . . ” (Redmond & Phillips, 2017:207). Dr. Debra Vidali (Emory Anthropology; Faculty director for the Experimental Ethnography at Emory working group) took this as an opportunity to talk to Dr. Phillips about multimodal argumentation, ethnographic documentation, listening parties, and a playlist for the Futures of Black Radicalism. “The People Who Keep on Going” mixtape is hosted on Dr. Phillips’ TheDreadstarMovement site. Experimental Ethnography @ Emory
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