Faculty in the anthropology department are expert teachers and scholars who are in the forefront of comtemporary research in the field. You'll learn from some of the nation's top scholars who bring their research interests into the classroom. In this photo, Jonah Steinberg, associate professor of anthropology and director of Global Studies at the University of Vermont, is pictured with a Bulgarian Roma family on Marseille's La Canebière. Steinberg recently won a three-year, $299,710 grant from the Cultural Anthropology Program at the National Science Foundation (NSF) to research how groups at the margins of society interact in the tremendously diverse city of Marseille. “Marseille is interesting because you have this ethnic mix of Romani people and relative newcomers, like refugees from conflicts in the Middle East, who are living and interacting on the periphery of the city,” Steinberg explains.

 

The grant, titled “Social and Geographic Marginality in Contemporary Urban Spaces,” supports Steinberg’s research on fundamental questions of race, space, nation and segregation. Specifically, he will investigate how marginalized groups, including refugees and Romani people, co-exist in marginal urban spaces like highway underpasses, urban forests, and abandoned lots. “Marseille is interesting because you have this ethnic mix of Romani people and relative newcomers, like refugees from conflicts in the Middle East, who are living and interacting on the periphery of the city,” Steinberg explains.

Areas of Research

Professor Jennifer Dickinson Winds Fulbright Award

Professor Jennifer Dickinson has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program grant to Ukraine from the U.S. Department of state and J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Her research topic is “Lviv’s Deaf Community: Language and Identity in a Time of Transition,” a project that combines ethnographic and oral historical research to understand continuity and change in the identity of members of the Deaf community in a mid-sized Ukrainian city. Professor Dickinson’s research is focused on adult deaf Ukrainians and their work lives.  To better understand how use of Ukrainian Sign Language (USL), professional training and work history, and recent political changes in Ukraine all contribute to identity, Dickinson was in the field for four months, spending time with adult Ukrainians in professional training courses, at a factory owned by the Ukrainian Society for the Deaf, and at events for retired members of the community. 

Anthropology Faculty Awarded UVM CAS Grants

Thre anthropology faculty members, Jennifer Dickinson, Teresa Mares, and Jeanne Shea, were recently awarded research and teaching grants from UVM’s College of Arts and Sciences.

Jennifer Dickinson was awarded CAS International Travel Funds to present a paper at the Association for East European and Eurasian Studies/International Association for the Humanities (ASEEES-MAG joint conference) in Lviv, Ukraine in June/July, 2016.

Teresa Mares received an Enhancing Excellence through Interdisciplinary Experiential Engagement Grant of $7693 for her project with Rachael Montesano (Romance Languages and Linguistics). Mares and Montesano's project "Food in the Field: Enhancing Collaboration with Spanish-speaking Farmworkers in Vermont" brough together their SPAN 052 and ANTH 296 courses in the spring of 2017 in an interdisciplinary exploration and engagement with topics related to food and migration for farmworkers in the United States. Through focusing in on the lives of migrant farmworkers in Vermont, Montesano and Mares bridged their students’ interests in language acquisition, labor studies and culture to aquant them with the local food system and the workers who maintain it. 

Jeanne Shea was awarded a CAS Faculty Research Support Award, with special designation as the Joan Smith Faculty Research Award, for her project on Urban to Rural Extension of the Senior Companions Programs in the US and China: "Societal Use of Older Adult Volunteers to Support Community-Based Aging in Place." Shea was also awarded CAS International Travel Funds to present a paper at the Society for East Asian Anthropology Conference in June, 2016, at Chinese University of Hong Kong. While in Hong Kong, she conducted field research on the Peers for Progress volunteer program, which was the immediate inspiration for the Senior Companions program in Shanghai where she will be conducting research over the next few years.

Jonah Steinberg Publishes Book with Yale University Press

Jonah Steinberg’s second book A Garland of Bones considers child runaways in postcolonial context from spatial, ethnographic, and historical vantage points, with emphases on relationships between rural change and children’s departures and on the place of runways as undesirable subjects in campaigns of urban cleansing. Steinburg's book is concerned with the balance of well-patterned cultural pathways, on the one hand, and the intimate experience of historical crisis, on the other, in children’s autonomous decisions to leave home for the city. The book is in Yale’s Fall 2017 catalog, and is published in the Agrarian Studies series edited by James C. Scott.

Special Issue of Pragmatics Edited by Jennifer Dickinson

Professor Jennifer Dickinson served as the editor of a new special issue of Pragmatics (25:4 December 2015) titled “Language ideologies and writing systems." The volume brings together a collection of articles by linguistic anthropologists studying the interplay between the production and interpretation of written language on one hand, and the language ideologies that organize that production and interpretation on the other. It includes Professor Dickinson’s own article “Plastic letters: Alphabet mixing and ideologies of print in Ukrainian shop signs."

New Publication by Dr. Jonah Steinberg

Jonah Steinberg’s paper “Writing Transnationality: Locating Citizenship in Fluid Cartographies” was featured in a volume on the meaning of citizenship recently released by Wayne State University Press.
 

 

Dr. John Crock Presents at Annual Meeting of the Anguilla Archaeological and Historical Society

Dr. John Crock, associate professor of anthropology and director of the consulting archaeology program at UVM, recently co-presented at the Annual General Meeting of The Anguilla Archaeological and Historical Socity, along with Dr. David Watters. Their presentation was recently featured in The Anguillian, the weekly independent newspaper of Anguilla. Dr. Crock was also recently elected to a director position on the Executive Board of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology.

Parker VanValkenburg Co-authors Article

Parker VanValkenburgh’s co-authored article with Sarah Kennedy entitled “Zooarchaeology and Changing Food Practices at Carrizales, Peru Following the Spanish Invasion” was accepted for publication in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology. He is also a co-author on the article “Sherds on the Edge: Characterisation of 16th Century Colonial Spanish Pottery Recovered from the Solomon Islands,” with Sarah Kelloway, Timothy Ferguson, Javier G. Iñañez, Cody C. Roush, Martin Gibbs and Michael D. Glascock, which was recently published in the journal Archaeometry.

 

 

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