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Bard Faculty Members Richard H. Davis and Laura Kunreuther Awarded National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship Awards

Two members of the Bard College faculty have been awarded the National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowships Award to support their scholarly humanities book projects: Richard H. Davis, professor of religion, for his book project, Religious Cultures of Early India, up to 700 CE, and Laura Kunreuther, associate professor of anthropology, to support research and writing for her book project, Interpreting the Field, Translating Global Voices: On the Labor of Interpreters in U.N. Field Missions.

Bard Faculty Members Richard H. Davis and Laura Kunreuther Awarded National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship Awards

Two members of the Bard College faculty have been awarded the National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowships Award (up to $60,000) to support their scholarly humanities book projects: Richard H. Davis, professor of religion, for his book project, Religious Cultures of Early India, up to 700 CE, which describes the development of religious cultures in India, from the earliest evidence to 700 CE, including the interrelated traditions that became Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and Laura Kunreuther, associate professor of anthropology, to support research and writing for her book project, Interpreting the Field, Translating Global Voices: On the Labor of Interpreters in U.N. Field Missions, which studies how U.N. mission interpreters translate trauma across different languages and how such translation affects the interpreters themselves. 
 
More about the Awards
neh.gov

Post Date: 01-27-2021

Bard Anthropology Professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins Wins Prestigious Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association

Bard anthropology professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins has been awarded the Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for her book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). The Albert Hourani Book Award was established in 1991 to recognize outstanding publishing in Middle East studies.

Bard Anthropology Professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins Wins Prestigious Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association

Bard anthropology professor Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins has been awarded the Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) for her book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019). The Albert Hourani Book Award was established in 1991 to recognize outstanding publishing in Middle East studies. The award was named for Albert Hourani to recognize his long and distinguished career as teacher and mentor. Announced at the awards ceremony at MESA’s annual meeting, the Albert Hourani Book Award honors a work that exemplifies scholarly excellence and clarity of presentation in the tradition of Albert Hourani. In the words of the award committee, “This book offers an outstanding and novel contribution to the study of Palestinian life as a waste siege. Through a rich ethnography and a sophisticated theoretical analysis this book focuses on the governance and governing power of waste.”

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is a non-profit association that fosters the study of the Middle East, promotes high standards of scholarship and teaching, and encourages public understanding of the region and its peoples through programs, publications and services that enhance education, further intellectual exchange, recognize professional distinction, and defend academic freedom in accordance with its status as a 501(c)(3) scientific, educational, literary, and charitable organization. For more information, visit mesana.org.

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is assistant professor of anthropology at Bard. Her research interests include infrastructure, science and environment, colonialism, austerity, the “sharing economy,” the Middle East, and Europe. Her first book, Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), is an ethnography of waste management in the absence of a state. She is currently working on a new book titled Homing Austerity: Airbnb in Athens. Her articles have been published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, Jerusalem Quarterly, Jadaliyya, and The New Centennial Review, among others.
# # #
(10.13.20)
 

Post Date: 10-13-2020

Bard Archaeologist Christophe Lindner and Senior Ethan Dickerman ’20 Present Research on 19th-Century Germantown Community of Free African Americans

Bard Archaeologist in Residence Christophe Lindner and anthropology major Ethan Dickerman ’20 copresented a poster exhibit, “Cosmic Context, Emancipated Persons, Germantown Parsonage,” at the annual international conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Boston this January.

Bard Archaeologist Christophe Lindner and Senior Ethan Dickerman ’20 Present Research on 19th-Century Germantown Community of Free African Americans

Bard Archaeologist in Residence Christophe Lindner and anthropology major Ethan Dickerman ’20 copresented a poster exhibit, “Cosmic Context, Emancipated Persons, Germantown Parsonage,” at the annual international conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology in Boston this January. The poster details the hearth at the Maple Avenue Parsonage, or minister’s residence, in Germantown, New York, a site that Bard Archaeology has been excavating since 2009. The hearth dates from 1767–1911, an era in which African Americans first lived in the residence as slaves, next in 1830 as free people with the family of the minister’s physician nephew, and then, in 1852, as owners of the property, where they lived with their relatives until 1911. The excavation revealed a West African cosmography diagram etched in the wooden frame of the cellar fireplace as well as objects concealed beneath the hearthstones, emplaced during rituals of healing and well-being performed on behalf of the community.

 
“Cosmic Context, Emancipated Persons, Germantown Parsonage,” poster, 48 x 96 in.
“Cosmic Context, Emancipated Persons, Germantown Parsonage,” poster exhibit, 48 x 96 in.
 
Dickerman, who coauthored the poster, recently completed his Senior Project on the Parsonage site and its surrounding communities, from its immediate neighborhood to the larger Mid-Hudson region. Through the Bard Archaeology Field School, a hands-on for-credit summer learning program that he directs, Lindner has worked with Bard undergraduates, local high school students, and colleagues in the community to excavate the site and research the descendants of the 1710 Palatine migration and their later neighbors, including free African Americans. The Palatines in 1710 constituted the largest single mass migration into the colony of New York and established, 10 miles north of Bard, the first substantial German-speaking settlement in the New World.

Lindner will report on this background research and its symbolic material aspects at the Bard Graduate Center symposium “Revealing Communities: The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the 19th Century.” Fourteen speakers will discuss how they have approached researching these communities, many of which were bulwarks in the abolition and early civil rights movements, and places where residents formed positive social connections both between and across racial lines. Yet these important communities have been largely excluded from mainstream American history.

Free and open to the public, the symposium will be held at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City on February 7. For more information or to register, click below.
Details on the BGC Symposium
Watch video of Germantown Parsonage

Post Date: 02-03-2020

Anthropology Events

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2021

Thursday, April 8, 2021
Written by Alisse Waterston; Illustrated by Charlotte Corden
Online Event  5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In this joint presentation, an anthropologist-writer and an artist-anthropologist reflect on aspects of their extraordinary collaboration in the making of Light in Dark Times: The Human Search for Meaning, a graphic novel rooted in nonfiction comprised of fictionalized encounters with writers, philosophers, activists and anthropologists. The collaboration and its published book are unique in bringing together serious scholarship and contemporary aesthetics, elevating the graphic genre by presenting complex philosophical and political themes in a mixed media format. In this presentation, the artist and the author describe the process of their artistic creation, an exceptional experiment in art, aesthetics and anthropology. Designed to reach multiple audiences, the book conveys the drama of the world in dark times and difficult circumstances even as it reveals spaces of excitement and hope. The reflections on the production process in this presentation provide insight into innovative ways of demonstrating the relevance of scholarship to real-world concerns, and how to take advantage of multimodal formats to produce, disseminate and receive knowledge in the interest of a more just, ethical world. 

Alisse Waterston is Presidential Scholar and Professor, City University of New York, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and author or editor of seven books. A Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies (SCAS) in the Programmes in Transnational Processes, Structural Violence, and Inequality (2020-2022), she served as President of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in 2015-17. In addition, Waterston serves as Editor of the book series, Intimate Ethnography (Berghahn Books) and Advisor for Otherwise Magazine. Her most recent article is “Imagining World Solidarities for a Livable Future,” kritisk etnografi – Swedish Journal of Anthropology (2020).

Charlotte Corden is an illustrator and fine artist whose work centers around what it is to be human. She is fascinated with how the power of hand-drawn images can reveal and describe complex truths. As anthropologist and illustrator she has worked with Stripe Partners, the British Cabinet Office, and the National Health Service, UK. As a fine artist, she has studied drawing and painting at the London Fine Art Studios and the Arts Student’s League in New York City. 

Join via Zoom Meeting ID: 839 1812 6364 / Passcode: 822601


Monday, March 29, 2021
Online Event  12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Bodies and clothing are in exchange and influence each other. Guyanese Hindus describe this interrelationship of clothing and bodies by highlighting that during acts of consuming clothing—when it is worn or gifted—substances and energies are transferred between bodies and dress, creating mutual touch. This touch is facilitated through for example body fluids, which transform used or ‘touched’ clothing into a person’s material likeness. Clothes and other material objects are thus dwelling structures for substances and energies, which have a special capacity to ‘take on’ former consumers. 

Used clothes are frequently exchanged within Guyanese Hindu families, a practice that remains relevant in the context of migration and is facilitated by the sending of ‘barrels.’ Gifts of used clothing become a means of recreating transnational families and religious communities. Additionally, gifts of clothing are not only relevant with regard to human social actors, but they furthermore materialize and visualize the relationships between people and deities, as clothes are frequently offered to deities during Hindu pujas (ritual veneration). In this talk I discuss the notions of touch and contact in the context of Guyanese transnational migration: I argue that in transnational networks, gifts of used clothing facilitate a means to literally stay in touch.

Sinah Kloß holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Heidelberg University, Germany. Since February 2020 she is leader of the research group “Marking Power: Embodied Dependencies, Haptic Regimes and Body Modification” at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), University of Bonn, Germany. Her current research project discusses the sensory history of touch and body modification and the interrelation of permanence, tactility, religion and servitude in Hindu communities of Suriname, Trinidad and Guyana. Her most recent books include the edited volume “Tattoo Histories: Transcultural Perspectives on the Narratives, Practices, and Representations of Tattooing” (Routledge, 2020) and the monograph “Fabrics of Indianness: The Exchange and Consumption of Clothing in Transnational Guyanese Hindu Communities” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).Join via Zoom:
https://bard.zoom.us/j/82737596363?pwd=ZUpKOUNhYlpjQmwxNHFSS3llY2xkQT09
Meeting ID: 827 3759 6363
Passcode: 614305


Tuesday, March 23, 2021
Online Event  5:15 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4
Environmental and infrastructural transformations in Turkey’s expansive swamps and marshes have unfolded against the backdrop of tightening authoritarian rule and the rise of wetland conservation. Drawing on fieldwork with farmers, scientists, and bureaucrats in two Turkish agrarian deltas, this talk explores how relationships between water, sediment, infrastructure, plants, and animals matter in contemporary Turkey, and what these relationships reveal about the intersection of moral and ecological concerns in the current moment. The “wetland” emerged as a globally significant scientific category over the course of the 20th century, becoming a key concept within Turkish state-making projects built on attempts to manipulate swampy nature. As transnational science and environmentalism cast the wetland in a starring role, Turkish farmers, scientists, and bureaucrats also drew on wetlands (sulakalanlar) as a novel idiom for claiming divergent ecological futures. I analyze these transformations between humans, non-humans, and their unstable surroundings in Turkey through the concept of moral ecologies—contrasting notions of just relations among people, land, water, infrastructure, animals, and plants. Divergent moral claims about ecology, infrastructure, and the livelihood of nonhuman animals have become central to a Turkish politics of livability. This approach to the wetlands of contemporary Turkey demonstrates how the valuation and governance of non-human creatures and elemental assemblages are not only entangled with human politics: they constitute it. 

Caterina Scaramelli is an anthropologist of the environment and science. After completing her PhD at MIT's History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society Program, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Humanistic Inquiry and in the Anthropology Department at Amherst College, and an Agrarian Studies postdoctoral associate at Yale. Currently, she is research assistant professor in the departments of Anthropology and of Earth and Environment at Boston University. Scaramelli's research addresses practices and politics of environmental expertise and the political ecology of conservation. Her fieldwork in Turkey has focused on the making and unmaking of watery places—rivers, wetlands, marshes, urban waters, and agricultural irrigation—and now she is studying the cultivation and contested meanings of "local" agricultural seeds. Her first book, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey, was published in March 2021 with Stanford University Press.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://bard.zoom.us/j/88142814000?pwd=S2ZqRVZoQVVnMTFQekdwc3RWbG5zdz09
Meeting ID: 881 4281 4000
Passcode: 337474


Saturday, February 20, 2021
Online Event  3:00 pm – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Caribbean Students Association invites the Bard community to join a virtual live screening and panel discussion of the newest Jamaican Dancehall documentary, Out There Without Fear, by Bard student Joelle Powe. This is a multidisciplinary cross-cultural experience expanding into gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, film, anthropology, sociology, music, Africana studies, history, preservation, and religion through the study of dance. 

Day 1: Panel Discussion – February 19 from 1 pm to 3 pm EST
Meet with the filmmaker and panelists calling in from Kingston, Jamaica. Musicologist Herbie Miller, iconic dancer Kool Kid, and internationally renowned choreographer Latonya Style want to answer your questions! The panel will be moderated by the documentarian, Joelle Powe. 

Day 2: Dance Workshop – February 20 from 3 pm to 4 pm EST 
Dance with two award-winning Dancehall celebrities, Kool Kid and Latonya Style.

Join Zoom here: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86881698188?pwd=R1FSVEtIRndaRFNMY202bzlMQzl1dz09
Meeting ID: 868 8169 8188
Passcode: 178132

Art . . . Dance . . . Classism . . . Violence . . . Sexuality . . . Homophobia . . . The Church . . . The Empowerment of Women . . . Blackness


Friday, February 19, 2021
Online Event  1:00 pm – 3:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
The Caribbean Students Association invites the Bard community to join a virtual live screening and panel discussion of the newest Jamaican Dancehall documentary, Out There Without Fear, by Bard student Joelle Powe. This is a multidisciplinary cross-cultural experience expanding into gender and sexuality studies, philosophy, theater, film, anthropology, sociology, music, Africana studies, history, preservation, and religion through the study of dance. 

Day 1: Panel Discussion – February 19 from 1 pm to 3 pm EST
Meet with the filmmaker and panelists calling in from Kingston, Jamaica. Musicologist Herbie Miller, iconic dancer Kool Kid, and internationally renowned choreographer Latonya Style want to answer your questions! The panel will be moderated by the documentarian, Joelle Powe. 

Day 2: Dance Workshop – February 20 from 3 pm to 4 pm EST 
Dance with two award-winning Dancehall celebrities, Kool Kid and Latonya Style.

Join Zoom here: https://bard.zoom.us/j/86881698188?pwd=R1FSVEtIRndaRFNMY202bzlMQzl1dz09
Meeting ID: 868 8169 8188
Passcode: 178132

Art . . . Dance . . . Classism . . . Violence . . . Sexuality . . . Homophobia . . . The Church . . . The Empowerment of Women . . . Blackness


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