Jane Henrici
President (11-13)
afapres@gmail.com
Jane Henrici is Study Director at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, DC. She specializes in gender, ethnicity and race within economic policy and development in Latin America and the United States, and directed IWPR’s research in the Middle East and North Africa. At IWPR since 2008, Henrici has published on poverty, immigration, education, social supports, and disasters as these affect women of different race and ethnic groups in different nations. Her doctoral and post-doctoral research was in Peru on gender and ethnicity in tourism and trade; her most recent articles and chapters relating to those topics appeared 2007-2010 following her Fulbright Scholar Award in Peru in 2006. While teaching anthropology full time at the University of Memphis 2001-2008, she co-authored Poor Families in America’s Health Care Crisis: How the Other Half Pays (Cambridge 2006), and was editor and contributing author for Doing Without: Women and Work after Welfare Reform (Arizona 2006). Currently, she is an elected Council Member for the Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (2009-2012) and President of the Association for Feminist Anthropology (2011-2013).
Ellen Lewin
President Elect (13-15)
Ellen-lewin@uiowa.edu
Ellen Lewin is Professor in the Departments of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and Anthropology at the University of Iowa. She works in the areas of feminist anthropology, lesbian/gay anthropology, and on issues of family, reproduction, and motherhood. She is the author of three ethnographies that focus on issues of lesbian/gay family formation and visibility: Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture, Recognizing Ourselves: Lesbian and Gay Ceremonies of Commitment, and Gay Fatherhood: Narratives of Family and Citizenship in America. She is the editor of a volume of classic writings in feminist anthropology, Feminist Anthropology: A Reader, and of Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America. She is also the co-editor, with William L. Leap, of three on lesbian/gay anthropology: Out in the Field, Out in Theory, and Out in Public. In her current research she is focusing on the uses of prayer by members of a coalition of predominantly Black LGBT Pentecostal churches. Her work has been supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY.
Sandra Faiman-Silva
Treasurer (09-12)
sfaimansilva@bridgew.edu
Sandra Faiman-Silva is Professor of Anthropology and Chair, Anthropology Department, at Bridgewater State College, where she has taught since 1985. As a cultural anthropologist generalist, among her favorite courses are gender, contemporary Native Americans, War, Peace, and Culture, and Latin America, ethnicity, and the anthropology of education. Her book Choctaws at the Crossroads: The Political Economy of Class and Culture in the Oklahoma Timber Region (U Nebraska 1997) was named as finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award by the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her book The Courage to Connect: Sexuality, Citizenship, and Community in Provincetown, looks at Provincetown’s history and social intersections across categories of difference, She has published articles on Indian gaming, youth and culture, and her Provincetown research, in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, and The Gay and Lesbian Review. She is a campus and community activist, and serves as grievance officer and Secretary of the Bridgewater State College-Massachusetts State College Association chapter, an NEA affiliate. She lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts, where she is active in the town’s “No Place for Hate” campaign and in other peace and justice causes. She enjoys motorcycle riding and photography, and spending time with her sons, Ishmael, Lucas, and Benjamin, and grandchildren Alexandra and Tyler.
Lynn Kwiatkowski
Secretary (11-14)
Lynn.Kwiatkowski@colostate.edu
Lynn Kwiatkowski is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Colorado State University. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist who has conducted research in the Philippines and Vietnam, focusing broadly on issues of health, gender, global health and development, and political and gender violence. Her research in Vietnam focuses on wife abuse in and near Hanoi, as she has analyzed local sociocultural influences on wife abuse, its emotional and physical health consequences for abused women, shifts in state management of domestic violence, and transnational forces that have led to changing approaches to this form of gender violence. Her research in highland Ifugao Province of the Philippines has examined ways that malnutrition and hunger, particularly among Ifugao women and children, are influenced by gender inequality, the state, international and local health programs, global development programs, religious proselytization, and political violence. She is the author of Struggling with Development: The Politics of Hunger and Gender in the Philippines (Westview Press, 1998). Her published essays based on her research in the Philippines focus on NGOs that address malnutrition and other health issues, feminist nationalism, and political violence, and appear in Urban Anthropology, Feminist Nationalism, and Brokering a Revolution: Cadres in a Philippine Insurgency. She has published essays focusing on wife abuse in Vietnam in Anthropology at the Front Lines of Gender-Based Violence, Practicing Anthropology, Research in Economic Anthropology, and Gendered Perspectives on International Development. She has recently conducted research focusing on wife abuse among ethnic minority groups in Vietnam.
Holly Dygert
Elected Member at Large (11-14)
hdygert@ric.edu
Holly Dygert is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rhode Island College. She is a sociocultural anthropologist who has conducted research on reproductive health, economic development and indigenous cultural politics in Mexico. Currently, she is writing a book manuscript that examines how Mexico’s anti-poverty efforts are reconfiguring indigenous villagers’ places within the state, and their relationships to one another. Dr. Dygert is also involved in efforts to promote safer and more transparent brownfield remediation in a neighborhood in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. As a member of the AFA’s board, Holly is advocating the creation of a peer-reviewed journal in Feminist Anthropology. She served as Program Chair for the AFA prior to joining the board. Holly also enjoys spending time with her husband, Ruben, and their two children, Grace and Benjamin.
Susan Brin Hyatt
Elected Member at Large (11-14)
suhyatt@iupui.edu
Susan Brin Hyatt was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. Her research focuses on examining neighborhoods as cultural settings and on women and community-based activism in both the US and the UK. She completed her PhD at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1996. After teaching at Temple University in Philadelphia for 8 1/2 years, Hyatt joined the Anthropology Department at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in January 2005 as an Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program for IUPUI’s new MA in Applied Anthropology. She was Program Chair for the AFA in 2001 and from 2004-2007, she was editor for the AFA publication Voices. She has also served as a member of the Sylvia Forman Award Committee.
Nadine Fernandez
Elected Member at Large (12-15)
Nadine.Fernandez@esc.edu
Nadine Fernandez is an associate professor at the State University of New York /Empire State College, a non-traditional college focusing on adult learner, where she serves as Area Coordinator for Family and Gender Studies. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, her research examines race and gender relations, particularly in Cuba, the Caribbean and Latin America. She is interested in the social impact of Cuba’s changing economics in the post-Soviet period, and particularly the effect of mass tourism on intimate relations on the island. She is currently researching Cuban marriage migration to Scandinavia, examining how gender, sexuality, and race are enmeshed in processes of transnational mobility, migration and tourism. Her 2010 book Revolutionizing Romance (Rutgers University Press) explores interracial couples and race-mixing in contemporary Cuba; an edited book (with Ariana Hernandez-Reguant) The Cuban Diaspora: Post-Soviet Migrations and Exiles is forthcoming in 2013 (University Press of Florida).
Chelsea Blackmore
Elected Member at Large (12-15)
cblackmo@ucsc.edu
Chelsea Blackmore is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is an anthropological archaeologist who explores how past societies constructed social difference, specifically in terms of class, kinship, and gendered identities. Her dissertation work and subsequent publications examined the connective processes between ancient Maya state and class formation through an analysis of materials and excavations conducted at the Chan archaeological site in Western Belize. This work merges critical feminist and queer theoretical perspectives, providing her a framework for deconstructing how archaeological interpretations often essentialize the roles of people and everyday life of lower status peoples in the past. While her primary research focuses on Mesoamerica, she has begun a new project at the Spanish Mission site of San Antonio de Padua (Jolon, California). Investigations consider the role of indigenous agency to enact change within the colonial landscape.
Isabelle LeBlanc
Student Representative (12-15)
abeille1411@yahoo.fr
Isabelle LeBlanc is a PhD student who is currently writing her sociolinguistics thesis on the links between gender ideologies and language in the Acadian francophone minority of New Brunswick, Canada. Her research interests include the circulation of women through French academic spaces and the gender-linguistic discourses of Acadian women. While she is currently associated with Moncton University, she has also studied and lived in Ottawa, Poitiers, Toulouse, Paris and Prague. Her doctoral research was initially funded by the Baxter-Ricard Foundation and is now being supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Isabelle would love to hear from fellow student members! Send her a message to introduce yourself, share your ideas or ask questions.
Jennifer Patico
Senior Co-Program Chair (12-16)
jpatico@gsu.edu
Jennifer Patico is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Georgia State University. A sociocultural anthropologist, her research and teaching interests are in gender, consumption and material culture, self and personhood, and cultures of capitalism. Her ethnography Consumption and Social Change in a Post-Soviet Middle Class (Stanford UP and Wilson Center 2008) examined shifting understandings of class identity, morality, and the marketplace in Russia, focusing on women public school teachers and their negotiations of middle-class respectability and value in the postsocialist context. Subsequently, she conducted multi-sited (Russia, U.S., and online) ethnographic research on the contentious issue of international matchmaking/marriage (known to some by the misleading term “mail-order bride industry”), examining the conflicts between anti-trafficking discourses inspired by the industry and the narratives of women and men who themselves have pursued international courtships and marriages. Jennifer’s newest research project is on children’s food, parenting ideologies, and the local politics of difference in Atlanta, GA. Her work has been published in journals including American Ethnologist, Ethnos, Slavic Review, and Critique of Anthropology.
Debarati Sen
Junior Co-Program Chair (13-17)
debarati9@gmail.com
Deberati Sen is Assistant Professor of International Conflict Management and Anthropology at Kennesaw State University, Atlanta, Georgia. She is a cultural anthropologist with a background in sociology and gender studies. Over the last several years she has conducted ethnographic research in various parts of South Asia, specifically the Darjeeling district in West Bengal (India), where she conducted research on women tea producers’ subjective engagements with and mobilizations around the global Fair Trade movement. Her research and teaching endeavors embody a strong commitment to issues of social justice and sustainable development from a feminist ethnographic perspective. Her courses are grounded in anthropological frameworks, ethnographic research-based scholarship and theoretical engagements that connect with significant issues at the local and global scale. At Kennesaw State she is the only faculty in the PhD program in International Conflict Management and the Anthropology Program teaching courses with a gender focus. The PhD seminars she teaches include “Intercultural Dynamics of Conflict,” and “Sustainable Development,” “Gender and Conflict.” At the undergraduate level she teaches “Anthropology of Gender,” and “Cultural Anthropology: Global Perspectives.” Her scholarly publications have most recently appeared in a prominent anthology titled, New South Asian Feminisms and journals such as Environment and Society, Journal of Emerging Knowledge and Emerging Markets, and Society and Natural Resources.
Susan Harper
Facebook Manager/Co-Book Review Editor
susanharperteaches@gmail.com
Susan Harper is an anthropologist, activist, writer, and educator. She received her BA in English and Anthropology from the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas in 1997. Susan’s graduate work took her to Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where she completed an MA in Cultural Anthropology in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology in 2005. Her dissertation research, which focused on the role of gender and sexual orientation among NeoPagans in Texas, was supervised by Caroline Brettell. She is currently completing a second MA degree, this time in Women’s Studies, at Texas Woman’s University. Her research interests include gender, sexual orientation/sexuality, feminist theory, queer theory, religion (particularly new religious movements), the politics of motherhood and family, education and educational justice, homeschooling, and the role of personal narrative in identity construction. Susan has taught at Southern Methodist University, University of Texas at Arlington, Mountain View College, Texas Woman’s University; she currently teaches at the University of North Texas. A passionate advocate and activist, Susan is involved in a number of social justice causes, including community education about religious and gender diversity, issues surrounding LGBTQ equality, domestic and sexual violence, and food justice. She served as Program Co-Chair for the AFA in 2011 and is the present Program Chair.
Jessica Smith Rolston
Anthropology News Contributing Editor
Jessica.Rolston@Colorado.edu
Jessica Smith Rolston is the Hennebach Assistant Professor of Liberal Arts and International Studies at the Colorado School of Mines. Her research in the American West and Peruvian Andes traces the commodity networks that surround mined materials and implicate a wide range of actors, from miners and corporate officials to ranchers and conservation activists. Within these networks, she focuses on questions of gender, labor, kinship, language and “responsible” capitalism. She is a member of the Early Career Scholars Program of the Work and Family Researchers Network, and her research has been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Anthropology Today, WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society, and edited volumes. With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is currently finishing the book manuscript for Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West.
Damla Isik
Anthropology News Contributing Editor
disik@regis.edu
Damla Isik is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Regis University. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Arizona with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies and a minor in Rhetoric. Her teaching and research interests include neoliberalization, globalization and labor politics in Turkey and the Middle East; NGO organizing and poverty alleviation; transnational feminisms; state-society relations; and political economy.
- Jamie Sherman
AFA Website Coordinator - femanth@gmail.com
Jamie Sherman (PhD Princeton 2011) does research on emergent and shifting dimensions of race, gender, and technology in everyday practices of body and self. She is currently completing an ethnography of play, pain and self-transformation at a largely immigrant “all natural” bodybuilding gym in Brooklyn, NY. Her more recent work looks at social dimensions of emergent technology practices and constructions of self. She works as a research scientist at Intel Labs.
Lauren Fordyce
AFA Co-Book Review Editor
fordycel@gmail.com
Lauren Fordyce is a recent PhD graduate in Anthropology from the University of Florida. She conducted her dissertation research on issues of reproductive health among Haitian women in South Florida and Haiti. Her areas of interest include: the anthropology of reproduction, medical anthropology, feminist anthropology and science and technology studies.
Beth Uzwiak
Voices Editorial Board (until 2013)
bethann@temple.edu
Beth Uzwiak is a doctoral candidate at Temple University. Her dissertation work is currently supported with a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. This comparative work—based on fieldwork in New York City and Belize—examines how NGOs represent gender violence as a human rights violation in the context of local social movement action. It considers the ethics that underpin transnational feminist human rights, as well as how activists use technology to mediate human rights claims. This year she also published a book entitled Telling it Straight: Community Narratives and Primary Health Care in Cayo, Belize, based on a two year collaborative research project that examines access to primary health care and medical pluralism in the context of Belize’s neoliberal health sector reform.
Amy E. Harper
Voices Editorial Board (until 2013)
aeharper@cocc.edu
Amy E. Harper is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Social Science Department at Central Oregon Community College in Bend, Oregon, where she has taught since 2002. She holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts- Amherst (2002). As a Europeanist, her research interests continue to be located in Germany exploring how discursive encounters with foreign residents reshape and challenge notions of belonging. As a generalist, she enjoys teaching the spectrum of anthropology to students who often have very little experience beyond rural Central Oregon. In particular, she finds it rewarding (and challenging) to teach Gender and Sexuality in Anthropological Perspective to students who often begin the term insisting they are not feminists who then end the term if not claiming feminist status at least recognizing the importance and relevance of feminist concerns to everyday life. Amy has been an active member of the AFA since 2005, serving first as a Board Member and later as Editor for the AFA journal Voices.
Rebecca Boucher
Twitter Manager/Voices Editorial Board (until 2013)
boucher.rebecca@gmail.com
Rebecca Boucher is a cultural anthropology doctoral student at Southern Methodist University. With a bachelor’s degree in psychology (from Middle Tennessee State University) and a Master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (from the University of Memphis), Rebecca has a strong commitment to interdisciplinary research. Her interests broadly include issues of inequality and intersections of class, race, gender, and ethnicity. More specifically, she is interested in women and labor, women’s activism and/or resistance, and consumption and material culture. She plans to do her dissertation research in Argentina, focusing on how the middle class has reconstructed itself both in response to the economic default of 2001 and to the current economic conditions.
R. Sophie Statzel
Curricula Coordinator
sstatzel@gmail.com
R. Sophie Statzel is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at the City University of New York. She has received a Masters in Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Her dissertation research focuses on the family, secularism, and politics in contemporary evangelical large churches. Her research interests include nationalist movements and religious mobilizations and critical race theory.