Princeton University

Celeste Alexander (pre-generals) is interested in the anthropology of global development and institutions, the lived environment, inequality and urbanization, particularly in rapidly urbanizing southern Africa. She is exploring the use of environmental and international development discourses invoked in land use planning in the Global South. Specifically she is interested in the legitimizing power of such discourses at local, national and international levels as well as the tensions between an emerging set of issues of global concern and local concerns and expectations in resource-poor areas of the Global South.

Diana Budur (post-fieldwork) is interested in the anthropologies of diaspora, transnationalism, kinship, gender and ethos with a focus on the Romany (Gypsy) people of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Budur is currently examining the making of Romany people into ethnically identifiable citizens of Brazil and the daily negotiations and constructions of a distinctive sub-national heritage through culture-specific honor and shame values. Budur's interest in feminist theories reflects in her analysis of women's negotiating the registers of two patriarchal cultures: the national Brazilian one, still reflected in the continued ban on abortion, and the Romany emphasis on male predominance as heads of families and political representation at the national level, despite the fact that women tend to be the family bread-winners through their card-reading practices. Budur has also worked on Romanian Romany deportees from Brazil, and their plans to continue attempts of deportation towards other states such as the United States. Budur is currently supporting her own research by working as a court interpreter for Immigration Court in New York City, interpreting Romanes/English for Romanian Romany. In addition, she is the associate producer to an upcoming HBO documentary on "American Gypsies," a Stick Figure Production.

Talia Dan-Cohen (post-generals).  Her work concerns the intersection of engineering and biology in the field of synthetic biology.  Her interests include epistemology and the anthropology of knowledge, technical expertise, rationalities and aesthetics, and the explorations -- empirical and theoretical -- of problems in the philosophy of science.

Gwen Gordon (post-generals) is interested in legal anthropology, land and property law in settler nations, ownership and management, stewardship and regulation. Her fieldwork will concern land-based Maori corporations in New Zealand and their connection to and management of assets related to Crown settlements over land ownership.

Ronnie Halevy (post-fieldwork) is studying the education of Bedouin women in the southern Negev of Israel, with research interests in national education, citizenship, “state”-“tribe” relations, and gender. Specifically, her dissertation investigates the ways in which various discourses are employed in the discussion of these topics when trying to make sense of the ways in which Bedouin women’s roles are changing.

Eva Harman (pre-generals) is interested in reconceptualizations of citizenship and belonging in Western Europe. She plans to conduct fieldwork in Ireland.

Sami Hermez (post-fieldwork) is a political anthropologist concerned with questions of political violence, social movements, security, memory, humor, and constructions of childhood in war and post-war zones. He conducted his fieldwork in Lebanon where his ethnographic study was of relations between combatants and non-combatants and the way they produced social life in an environment of constant anticipation of armed political conflict. His dissertation is tentatively titled: “Everyday Life and the Anticipation of War in Lebanon: A Study Amongst Ex-Militia Fighters.”

Janet Hine (pre-generals) is interested in the anthropology of science, particularly in the intersection of science, culture and language. She plans to study representations of scientific knowledge.

Su'ad  Khabeer (post-fieldwork). Her dissertation focuses on the intersections of race, place, and popular culture in the identity making of young American Muslims. She is particularly interested in the racial and spatial signifiers embedded in the aesthetic practices of American Muslim youth. Other interests include Diaspora Studies, Cultural Studies and Visual Anthropology.
 

Peter Kurie (post-generals) is interested in the anthropology of knowledges and academic disciplines, particularly in the relation of the humanities to the social and natural sciences. He's also interested in intellectual history, experimental non-fiction writing, and rock music.

Pablo Landa (pre-generals) works in Mexico and Brazil. His interests include the social and cultural history of modern architecture, public housing and state-formation policies, the relationship (or lack thereof) between personal identity narratives and national narratives, and the ways in which these narratives are articulated in relation to particular buildings and public spaces. Pablo is also interested in literature, the history of anthropology and the history of ideas.

Marouane Laouina (pre-generals) is interested in the anthropology of religion and more specifically Islam in Morocco. He has worked on the relationship between religious knowledge and religious authority and the changes that affected them during the last one hundred years. Marouane is interested in the formation of religious subjectivities in the context of multiple, sometimes antithetical religious discourses and practices in Morocco.

Kristine Latta (post-fieldwork) is interested in the anthropology of performance, tourism, and indigenous identity and the cross-cutting analytics of race, culture, and economy as these are configured in studies of the Andean region. Her dissertation research considers how indigenous textile merchants from Peguche in the Otavalo valley of Ecuador create an “indigenous life” out of mobility and a cash-rich local economy. Kristine argues that through contemporary performance, specifically novel genres that accommodate a high-degree of intertextuality, Peguchans bring into generative tension merchant activity, international travel, pan-indigenous identity politics, and local agrarian practices and values, to forge alternative visions of a pliable and mobile indigenous modernity. In so doing, they challenge everyday and scholarly assumptions about the trajectory of the “modernizing” Ecuadorian Indian and the commensurability of wealth and indigenous forms of sociality. Kristine’s research was supported by a pre-dissertation Social Science Research Council grant and a Fulbright-Hays dissertation research award.

Richard Joseph Martin (post-fieldwork) examines modern ritual practices in subcultural milieux. His dissertation, based on a study of practitioners of sadomasochism in Berlin, Germany, is a meditation on negotiations between discursive forms and experiential realities. Theoretically, his work combines functionalist approaches from British social anthropology with the insights of post-structuralist philosophies and Bakhtinian dialogics. Additional interests include: phenomenology, psychoanalysis and semiotics; intersubjectivity; political anthropologies of consent, human rights and privacy; exchange, power and hierarchy; spatial and temporal demarcation; the role of partnership in discourses of sex, erotics and kinship; and subjunctivity. His fieldwork was made possible by the generosity of Princeton’s Institute for International and Regional Studies; previous research in Germany was supported by a Fulbright grant. Currently, Martin is a graduate student fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion.

Arion Melidonis (post-fieldwork) is interested in how categories of national, ethnic and personal belonging are constructed and re-imagined in conflict societies. He has been working in Cyprus where he is focusing on the impact of the opening of the Green Line border that has divided the Turkish and Greek Cypriot populations of the island for over thirty years.  Arion has held Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows and PIIRS Dissertaton Writing Fellowships.
 

Claire B. Nicholas (post-generals). Her interests include the anthropology of labor/work, the anthropology of knowledge practices and expertise, coloniality and all of its associated prefixes, and the anthropology of development. She is currently conducting dissertation research in Morocco on contemporary incarnations of traditional textile craftsmanship and the various actors with stakes in its development.

Daniel Polk (pre-generals) is interested in legal and economic anthropolgy, natural resource management and sustainability, ethics and the environment; the U.S. Latino diaspora; Latin America and Costa Rica. He is also interested in the politics of water use and history of science in the Americas.

Erin Raffety (pre-generals) is currently studying the decreasing number of Chinese adoptions to Western countries in the current decade, as well as what a rise in Chinese foster care might suggest about changing Chinese cultural understandings regarding family, children, and the state. Her current research proposes that the notion of foster care may challenge not only the one-child policy, but the role of the state in China. Hence, understanding a burgeoning Chinese foster care system may provide valuable insight into the political and economic future of the world's most populous nation.

Mark Robinson (pre-generals) is interested in the anthropological study of science, medical anthropology and ethics. His research focuses on neuroscience and the emergence of a global neurotechnology market. Additional interests include psychopharmaceuticalization and global biopsychiatry. These research interests are part of a larger theoretical interest in ethics generally and neuroethics specifically.

Christopher Roy (post-fieldwork) will soon be completing his dissertation, a study of belonging, territoriality and family history in Abenaki country.

Joel Rozen (pre-generals) is a former journalist interested in the artistic development of developing nations, particularly those striving to reconcile a French colonial past with modernity and globalization. His research interests involve visual anthropology, museology, media and semiotics.

Saul Schwartz (pre-generals) is interested in the anthropology of knowledge, connections between anthropology and history, issues related to cultural preservation and language revitalization, and collaborative approaches to research with American Indian communities in the Midwest and Plains. Outside of anthropology, he enjoys folk and rock music, hiking, and vegan cuisine.

Jamie Sherman (post-fieldwork) works on the anthropology of the body at the 
intersection of race, gender, power and performance. Additional interests include urban anthropology, fieldwork methods, and the anthropology of everyday life. Her dissertation, an ethnography of urban “hardcore” bodybuilding in Brooklyn New York, brings together 
theories of performance, play, practice and power to reexamine the intersection of (self) transformation with race and gender in contemporary urban United States. Her doctoral studies have been supported by a Walter R. F. Guyer Graduate Fellowship, and the Center 
for African American Studies, and by research and writing grants from the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and the Program in American Studies.

Marissa Smith (pre-generals) is studying the Mongolian mining sector, especially enterprises established before 1990, as a locus for rereadings and crossreadings of economic, political, postsocialist, and postcolonial anthropologies. She is focusing particularly on the Erdenet copper-molybdenum combine, a thirty-year-old joint Mongolian-Russian project that comprises one of Mongolia's two second cities and a substantial portion of a natural resource-based economy, as well a center for Mongolia's Russian population.

Efstratios Sourlagas (post-generals) is interested in political anthropology and more specifically on how issues of migration, transnationalism and displacement relate to identity politics and state relations. He is currently in the field in Syria and Lebanon.

Nadezhda Dimitrova Savova (post-generals) is interested in comparing the community cultural centers networks in Bulgaria (chitalishte) and Cuba (casas de cultura) as spaces for the intangible cultural heritage promotion in line with UNESCO’s universal safeguarding principles. Nadezhda also does research on the social function of samba heritage tourism in Salvador de Bahia and the arts-based social projects in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her general academic interest explores the socially transformative role of the arts and the dynamic forms of symbolic capital that amateur creativity, understood as a wide-ranging aesthetic and imaginative everyday experience, generates within individuals and communities.

Riaz Tejani (post-fieldwork) is interested in the boundaries between public and private politics. His dissertation studies French human and civil rights organizations to learn how personal convictions about justice manifest themselves in popular movements, citizenship, and national belonging. Riaz holds a J.D. from the University of Southern California, and has served as a consultant to the Social and Human Sciences at UNESCO in Paris. Currently, he is a legal consultant on the U.S. public pension ("pay to play") scandal.   

Erica Weiss (post-fieldwork) is researching how Israeli conscientious objectors call into question the universality of military service on the grounds of conscience.  Erica is investigating how the state deals with the question of conscience in terms of legitimation and recognition, as well as how the refuseniks seek to redefine their relationship with the state and the military.  She is also concerned with the contradictory ways in which participation in the Israeli military is seen as both obligatory and voluntary in relation to the metamorphosing discourse on sacrifice as used by the state and by conscientious objectors.  This research highlights the struggle for discursive control between the state and the conscientious objectors on the topics of conscience, duty and sacrifice.

Jessica Zuchowski (post-fieldwork) is interested in the relationship between social suffering, gendered subjectivity, and health care institutions. Her comparative fieldwork in the US and Britain focuses on the development of Fibromyalgia Syndrome, a contested chronic pain illness, in contexts of private and public health care delivery. This work asks how officialized and often gendered discourses about the questionable legitimacy of chronic pain (“real” versus “psychosomatic”) impact the everyday experiences of those seeking care.  Jessica received a Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows grant to write her dissertation.