Department of Anthropology

Fall 2011

Dr. Joanne Rappaport

Professor Rappaport is working on a project titled, "The Meaning of Mestizaje in the Early Colonial New Kingdom of Granada," and it is being funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. It is a documentary study of the process of racial mixing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in what is today central highland Colombia (the region surrounding Bogota), focusing in particular on how status, gender, and location influence multiple definitions of what it means to be mestizo or mulatto.

Dr. Rochelle Davis

Rochelle Davis has a fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to write a book on the subject of cultural knowledge and the US military warfighting strategies in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her research examines how U.S. military personnel, foreign military troops, and non-combatant civilians, primarily Iraqis, make sense of the U.S. military’s new cultural knowledge paradigm as described in counterinsurgency doctrine, cultural training materials, and strategy and policy papers. She focuses on the new culture-centered content in strategy, policy, and training, how and what US Soldiers and Marines learn about Arabs and Muslims, and how Iraqis have understood and interpret the interest in and focus on their culture. The goal of the project is to elaborate on why particular notions of culture have been promoted, the types of programs, interactions, and paradigms they generate, and what the resulting new ways of thinking about culture and the US military mean for policy makers, military personnel, and for those on both sides in the arena of conflict.

Spring 2011

Dr. Gwendolyn Mikell

Professor Mikell is the recipient of the 2011 Distinguished Africanist Award given by the New York African Studies Association. She will be presented with the award at the NYASA Conference on March 25, 2011 in New York.

Dr. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Professor Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer has been awarded a Collaborative Research Grants in the Humanities fellowship, administered by American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS with funding through the National Endowment for the Humanities, for her project, /Contested Federalism and Identities: Can Liberal Nationalism Survive within Russia?/. She will be on leave from June-December 2010.

Dr. Susan Terrio

Professor Susan Terrio was awarded a summer research fellowship from the Georgetown University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for her research project entitled, "The Federal Custodial System for Unaccompanied, Undocumented Minors in the U.S." She intends to pursue her fieldwork research on federal shelters housing unaccompanied minors and hearings in U.S. immigration courts in Chicago, Detroit and North Carolina.

Dr. Melissa Fisher

Professor Melissa Fisher was awarded a summer research grant by the Georgetown Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor for her proposed collaborative project with Calvert Investments, entitled: "Improving the Lives of Working Poor Women: A Preliminary Study of the Impact of Sustainable Responsible Investing in Gender Equity."

Dr. Sylvia Onder

In the summer, Dr. Sylvia Wing Önder traveled to Baku, Azerbaijan and to five sites in Turkey as part of the U.S. State Department's Critical Language Scholarship program.

In the fall semester, Dr. Önder taught “Introduction to Medical Anthropology” which brought together students from Nursing and Health Sciences, pre-med students, and Anthropology majors for a lively exchange of ideas.

Assignments included individual case studies on “Health and Muslim Cultures” and group projects involving site visits to various types of locations providing health care, including a botanica in Adams Morgan, a community health center called "Bread for Life", the Georgetown Medical Center's Emergency Room, the GW Emergency Room, several acupuncturists' offices, a blood drive, an H1N1 clinic, a Washington D.C. Fire and Emergency Unit, and a Chinese healer's office.

In October, Dr Önder helped to organize a event called "African American - Turkish Connections Through the Arts" to celebrate the lives of James Baldwin and Ahmet Ertegun.

Dr Önder's fall presentations included:

“The Turkish Family” to the CAORC Critical Language Scholarship students at Georgetown University’s McGhee Center, Alanya, Turkey, June 25, 2009.

“Americans in Turkey: A History Worth Remembering,” at the University of Pennsylvania, November 5, 2009.

“American Global Politics and the Muslim Woman” as a part of a series of “Islam and Feminism” at Howard University, December 2, 2009.

For the Spring semester, Dr Önder is developing a course called, "Europe and Islam: Orientalist Fantasies and Turkish Realities."

Archives