Yale University Department of Anthropology

Professor Karen Nakamura promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:55:58 -0400

The Yale Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that Karen Nakamura currently an Associate Professor on Term has been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure effective July 1, 2013.

Professor Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist whose research focuses on disability and minority social movements in contemporary Japan. Her ethnography about sign language, identity, and deaf social movements was published by Cornell University Press in 2006. More recently, she has been engaged in a new project on the comparative politics of severe physical and psychiatric disabilities in the United States and Japan. While her main focus is disabilities and minorities, she also works on issues surrounding gender and sexuality.

She was on a Yale Junior Faculty Fellowship (2007-2008) to conduct research on psychiatric and physical disabilities in Japan. She was previously granted an Abe Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership to pursue research on comparative disability politics in Japan and the United States during the 2004-2005 academic year. A little while back, one of her journal articles won the 2003 ISS/Oxford University Press Prize for Modern Japanese Studies. It was later selected to be one of Oxford University Press' 100 seminal papers celebrating their centennial of academic publishing. More recently, her monograph Deaf in Japan was awarded the 2008 John Whitney Hall Book Prize by the Association for Asian Studies.

Her latest book A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (Cornell University Press, 2013) is due to be published July 2013.

She is on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist and was elected co-chair of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Anthropology (SOLGA). She is also on the Board for the Society for Visual Anthropology (2009-2012) and has previously served for the AAA on the Long Range Planning Committee, AAA Minority Issues in Anthropology Commission (2005.11-2008.11), as well as a liaison to the Committee on Ethics.

Professor William Honeychurch promoted to Associate Professor on Term

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:53:49 -0400

The Yale Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that William Honeychurch currently an Assistant Professor has been promoted to Associate Professor on Term effective July 1, 2013.

Professor Honeychurch’s research is on the archaeology of ancient nomadic political organization in eastern Eurasia. Nomadic groups of the Eurasian steppe organized large-scale states and empires from the first millennium BC and are best known for the world empire constructed by the medieval Mongols under Genghis Khan. How and why relatively small groups of pastoral nomads assembled such monumental and complex polities is a topic that informs us about different approaches to political relationships, state organization, and inter-cultural contact. Study of Eurasian steppe political systems gives valuable insight to how other large-scale empires were created and maintained over time, especially those in the Andes, the Mediterranean, and Southwest Asia where significant pastoral populations have resided.

He studies these questions through the archaeological material remains left by horse nomads over the past 3000 years on the steppes of Mongolia. His field projects emphasize regional pedestrian survey to discover and map cemeteries, habitation sites, walled complexes, rock art, and ceremonial areas. His research teams follow up field survey with GIS spatial analysis, materials analysis, paleo-environmental reconstruction and excavations at cemeteries and living sites to test ideas developed from regional analyses. Such intensive research programs allow us to understand how a particular area changed organizationally during the rise and fall of steppe states and empires. To date, he and his colleagues have completed survey and excavation projects at Egiin Gol in north central Mongolia and at Baga Gazaryn Chuluu in the Middle Gobi of Mongolia. They will carry out a new field project from 2012 to 2017 in the Mongolian eastern provinces in order to examine political interactions and contacts with Early Iron Age groups to the south in the Inner Mongolian region.

Professor Jafari Allen promoted to Associate Professor on Term

Fri, 17 May 2013 09:44:54 -0400

The Yale Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that Jafari Allen, currently an Assistant Professor has been promoted to Associate Professor on Term effective July 1, 2013.

Professor Allen, jointly appointed with the Department of African American Studies, works at the intersections of [queer] sexuality, gender and blackness -- in Cuba, the US, and transnationally. A recipient of fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council Sexuality Research Program, and Rockefeller Foundation [Diasporic Racisms Project]; he teaches courses on the cultural politics of race, sexuality and gender in Black diasporas; Black feminist and queer theory; critical cultural studies; ethnographic methodology and writing; subjectivity, consciousness and resistance; Cuba and the Caribbean.

Dr. Allen’s critical ethnography, ¡Venceremos?: Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba [Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press, Fall 2011], marshals a combination of historical, literary, and cultural analysis-- most centrally, ethnographic rendering of the everyday experiences and reflections of Black Cubans—to show how Black men and women strategically deploy, re-interpret, transgress and potentially transform racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities, through “erotic self-making.” ¡Venceremos? argues that mutually constituting scenes in Havana and Santiago de Cuba-- like semi-private, extra-legal parties of men who have sex with men; HIV education activism; lesbian performance and incipient organizing of women who have sex with women; hip-hop and la monia (US R&B/soul music) parties and concerts; sex labor; cigar “hustling”; and informal Black consciousness raising networks-- represent a gravid space for becoming new revolutionary men and women, with new racial, gender and sexual subjectivities.

His current research project, Black Queer Here and There: Movement and Sociality in the Americas, traces cultural and political circuits of transnational queer desire—in travel, tourism, (im)migration, art and activism.

Professor Allen earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2004. Prior to joining the Yale faculty in 2008, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.

Professors Siu and Sivaramakrishnan awarded $500,000 InterAsia Grant to support network of scholars

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:22:01 -0400

A grant of $500,000 to Yale from the Carnegie Corporation of New York will support the “InterAsia Initiative,” a global network of scholars who are taking a novel trans-regional approach to the study of Asian topics.

InterAsia Initiative is a collaborative multi-institutional group that includes the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the National University of Singapore (NUS), the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS) at the University of Hong Kong, Göttingen University (Germany), the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (Lebanon), and Koç University (Turkey). The MacMillan Center at Yale and the SSRC are managing the project.

“The InterAsia Initiative aims to shift paradigms in how we conceptualize Asia by promoting collaborative research, scholarly networking, and public policy connections,” says Helen Siu, professor of anthropology at Yale. “We are working to reveal and depict Asia as an interlinked set of formations stretching from the Middle East through Eurasia, Central Asia, and South Asia to Southeast Asia and East Asia.” This approach, she notes, necessitates deep collaboration among social scientists and humanists.

With the Carnegie Corporation support, the initiative will aim to develop:

• A comprehensive, online, searchable scholars database, which will be populated with information obtained through various InterAsian organizations — including all InterAsian Connections Conferences, follow-up research collaborations and publications, the SSRC’s Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research, and the newly formed Transregional Virtual Research Institute (TVRI) scholars’ group — as well as research conducted by the Postdoctoral Research and other initiative-related scholars. 
• An updated project website for disseminating research and networking materials, particularly to U.S. policymakers.

• A large international conference that will serve to cement existing scholars’ networks and expand the growing group of InterAsia scholars.

• Resources such as background materials, bibliographies, and recommended websites.

Principal investigators of the project are Siu and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Yale professors of India and South Asian studies who are affiliated with the MacMillan Center through its councils on East Asian Studies and South Asian Studies. The project is supported financially and administratively by the councils and will reinforce the MacMillan Center’s role as a hub of interdisciplinary research on contemporary issues of global, institutional, and human import. It will also capitalize on the research done by the InterAsia Initiative over the course of the past three years.

“We are grateful for the generous support from the Carnegie Corporation,” says Sivaramakrishnan. “The InterAsia Initiative will highlight the shifting regional dynamics by mapping the changing shape of emerging sub-regions, as well as the emergence of new narratives on ‘who defines Asia through time.’”

Originally published on news.yale.edu