People
Faculty COLAS, Pierre Robert (Ph.D. 2004, University of Bonn, Germany) Dr. Colas’ research focuses on the epigraphy and iconography of Classic Maya culture and also on the ethnography of the Yucatec Maya of Belize. Additionally he has cooperated in cave archaeology projects. He is currently working on two major projects, one concerning identity boundaries in Classic Maya culture as seen through Classic Maya hieroglyphs. The other project focuses on the effects of globalization and Christian fundamentalism on the acquisition of the Yucatec Maya language in Belize. His publications include The Sacred and the Profane: Architecture and Identity in the Classic Maya Lowlands (2000), and Jaws of the Underworld: Life, Death, and Rebirth among the Ancient Maya (2006), both as co-editor, as well as a monograph, The Meaning of Classic Maya Personal Names (2004), several book chapters and peer reviewed articles.  CONKLIN, Beth A. (Ph.D. 1989, Univ. of California at San Francisco and Berkeley); Director of Graduate Studies Professor Conklin is a cultural and medical anthropologist specializing in the ethnology of indigenous peoples of lowland South America (Amazonia). Her research focuses on the anthropology of the body, religion and ritual, cannibalism, death and mourning, disease and healing, and indigenous identity politics. She teaches courses on cultural anthropology, medical anthropology, shamanism, international development, South American Indians, and the anthropology of contemporary issues. Her publications include Consuming Grief: Mortuary Cannibalism in an Amazonian Society, "Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs: Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism," and (with Laura Graham) "The Shifting Middle Ground: Brazilian Indians and Eco-Politics."  DEMAREST, Arthur (Ph.D. 1981, Harvard) Ingram Professor, Anthropology; Director, Vanderbilt Institute of Mesoamerican Archaeology; General Editor VIMA Monographs in Archaeology.
Distinguished Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Professor Extraordinaire and Honorary Doctorate at the Universidad Austral de Chile. Professor Dillehay has carried out numerous archaeological and anthropological projects in Peru, Chile, Argentina and other South American countries and in the United States. His main interests are migration, the long-term transformative processes leading to political and economic change, and the interdisciplinary and historical methodologies designed to study those processes. He has been a Visiting Professor at several universities around the world, including the Universidad de Chile, Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Cambridge University, University of Tokyo, University of Chicago, among others. Professor Dillehay has published fifteen books and more than two hundred refereed journal articles and books. He currently co-directs with the University of Chicago an interdisciplinary project focused on long-term human and environmental interaction on the north coast of Peru. He has began an excavation project at Huaca Prieta, Peru. He directs another project sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation on the political identity of the Araucanians in Chile and Argentina. Professor Dillehay has received numerous international and national awards for his research, books and teaching. Professor Dillehay is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  ESTRADA-BELLI, Francisco (Ph.D. 1998, Boston Univ.) Dr. Estrada Belli is an archaeologist working the Maya region. His research and teaching interests include settlement pattern studies, the rise of complex societies, the application of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems Archaeology, and underwater archaeology. He has excavated in Guatemala, Belize, US, Italy and Bermuda. In the last ten years he has directed major archaeological projects, first on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala, then in the Holmul region of Peten, Guatemala where he and Vanderbilt graduate and undergraduate students are uncovering the Preclassic city of Cival (featured in the 2004 PBS film "Dawn of the Maya"). His publications include a book entitled The Emergence of Complex Societies in Southeastern Pacific Coastal Guatemala: a GIS Approach and several journal articles and web publications on the prehistory of southeastern Guatemala, the Maya Lowlands, and GIS and Remote Sensing. FISCHER, Edward F. (PhD 1996, Tulane University) Dr. Fischer's research combines cultural anthropology and political economy with a geographical focus on highland Guatemala and Germany. His ongoing fieldwork is centered in the Kaqchikel town of Tecpán and he has also worked extensively with the leaders of Guatemala's pan-Maya movement. His books include Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala (co-edited with R. McKenna Brown), Cultural Logics and Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice (A Choice Outstanding Academic Title), Tecpán Guatemala: A Modern Maya Town in Local and Global Context (co-authored with Carol Hendrickson), and Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala (co-authored with Peter Benson). His most recent research looked at consumer behavior, labor relations, and moral models in Germany. More information is available from his homepage.  FOWLER, William R. (Ph.D. 1982, Calgary); Director of Undergraduate StudiesOffice phone: (615) 343-6123 Professor Fowler's current research focuses on the archaeology of the conquest period in Mesoamerica. Since 1996 he has directed excavations at Ciudad Vieja, El Salvador, the site of the first villa of San Salvador, founded in 1525 and abandoned in 1545. Although it was established as a Spanish-conquest city, San Salvador was principally occupied by Nahua-speaking Pipils of the region and Tlaxcallans from central Mexico who settled there as allies of the Spaniards. Through his research at Ciudad Vieja, Professor Fowler is exploring issues of culture contact and culture change during the first generation of the Conquest. He continues to explore his interests in the archaeology and ethnohistory of the pre-Columbian Pipils and other Nahua groups of Central America. His books include The Cultural Evolution of Ancient Nahua Civilizations, The Origins of Complex Society in Southeastern Mesoamerica, El Salvador: Antiguas Civilizaciones, Caluco: Arqueología e historia de un pueblo pipil en el siglo XVI, Investigaciones arqueológicas en Ciudad Vieja: La primigenia villa de San Salvador, and Arqueología histórica de la villa de San Salvador, El Salvador: Informe de las excavaciones (1996-2003). Since 1987 he has served as editor of the international journal Ancient Mesoamerica, published by Cambridge University Press. GILL, Lesley (Ph.D. 1984, Columbia) Dr. Gill's research in Latin America focuses on political violence, human rights, global economic restructuring, the state, and transformations in class, gender, and ethnic relations. She has conducted research in Bolivia, Colombia and the United States. She is interested in how free-market reforms and political violence have generated new, and aggravated old forms of inequality and reshaped the nature of collective action. Her books include: Precarious Dependencies: Gender, Class and Domestic Service (Columbia University Press, 1994), Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State (Columbia University Press, 2000), and The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence (Duke University Press, 2004).
Professor Gregor is interested in psychological anthropology, gender roles and sexuality, peace and aggression, psychoanalysis and culture, anthropological ethics, and native peoples of South America and anthropological film. He is the author of Mehinaku: The Drama of Daily Life in a Brazilian Indian Village and Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People. His edited books include A Natural History of Peace and The Anthropology of Peace and Nonviolence (coedited)and Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method (coedited). He has worked as a film maker for the BBC, Grenada Television and NET in making the television films Mehinaku, We are Mehinaku, Feathered Arrows and Dreams from the Forest. Professor Gregor recently conducted a field season among the Mehinaku focused on the system of peace that obtains in the region, culture change, and the degradation of the ecosystem due to the encroachment of Brazilian society. He is the co-author of a recent article on ethics and contemporary anthropology (American Anthropologist 2004) and he is currently completing a book on peaceful relations among tribes in Central Brazil. Professor Gregor, along with the Perls Foundation, is also assisting the Mehinaku in the production and merchandising of organic honey as part of an environmentally sustainable development project.  JANUSEK, John W. (Ph.D 1994, University of Chicago) Dr. Janusek is an archaeologist interested in the development of complex societies and cities in the South American Andes. His theoretical interests include: human agency/identity, power relations, urbanism, space and place, ritual practice, and household archaeology. He has worked in the Bolivian highlands since 1987, conducting research principally focused on Tiwanaku civilization and its precursors. He currently directs an interdisciplinary research project at the sites of Khonkho Wankane and Iruhito in the southern  ROMERO, Sergio F. (Ph.D. 2006, University of Pensylvania) Sergio is a linguist interested in language variation and change, language and culture, and the documentation of Native American languages. He is particularly interested in Mayan languages and Central American varieties of Nahuatl. His dissertation was a variationist study of ongoing change in the grammar of K'ichee', a Mayan language spoken in the western highlands of Guatemala. His current research is on the rise of new dialects of Q’eqchi’ in the lowlands of Guatemala and Peten, and on language ideology and language change in K’iche’. His publications include “Nahuatl Historical Sources from Guatemala” (To be published in the Handbook of Middle American Indians) and “Palatalization and Stylistic Variation in K’iche’” (In review).  ROSS, Norbert O. (Ph.D. 1998, Habilitation 2002, Univ. of Freiburg, Germany) Dr. Ross's research focuses on several Maya groups in Chiapas, Yucatán (Mexico) and the Petén (Guatemala). His work targets issues of culture and cognition, children’s acquisition of cultural knowledge, as well as cultural change. Current projects (funded by NSF and NIH) deal with the domains of folkbiology, ethnomedicine and religion. Dr. Ross also conducts research among North-American populations, mainly Hispanics in the USA and Menominee Native Americans in Wisconsin. He teaches courses on Maya ethnography, Maya language (Tzotzil and Yukatec), Religion, Environmental Anthropology, and Research methods. Dr. Ross has a background in the cognitive sciences (Northwestern University) and is developing an “Anthropology of predicitive Models” to be used within participant observations. Publications include Culture and Cognition, Implications for Theory and Method, Sage Publication (2004); Culture and Resource Conflict, (with Doug Medin and Doug Cox, 2006); as well as an array of articles in the leading journals.  SHAKOW, Miriam (Ph.D. 2008, Harvard) Miriam Shakow is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in how people experience and analyze state transformations. Her dissertation was a study of recent municipal conflict in central Bolivia, in which she examined how Bolivians engaged the principles and rhetoric of free market policies, state decentralization reforms, and new leftist parties. She is particularly interested in connecting personal experience, such as indigenous middle class identities, with large-scale political change. Her new research focuses on the ways in which teenagers and young adults have become the objects of fear in Bolivia and throughout Latin America in the context of rising unemployment and rising crime. She is the author “Andean ‘Civil Society’ and Political Imaginaries in Central Bolivia” (in review).  TUNG, Tiffiny A. (Ph.D. December 2003, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) Dr. Tung is a bioarchaeologist who examines mummies and skeletons from archaeological contexts to evaluate the health and disease status of ancient populations from the Peruvian Andes. Her research interests include paleopathology, skeletal biology, and violence-related trauma, particularly as they relate to elucidating the impact of imperialism on community health and individual lifeways. Her ongoing research in the Peruvian Andes examines how Wari imperial structures (AD 600 – 1000) affected, and were affected by, heartland and hinterland communities, documenting such things as diet and disease, migration patterns, rates of violence, and specific kinds of culturally mediated violence (e.g., ritual fighting, corporeal punishment, domestic violence). Dr. Tung is also investigating how imperial collapse affected community health in the former Wari imperial heartland, providing a diachronic view of ancient lifeways from a time of imperial rule to disintegration. Dr. Tung is director of the “Beringa Bioarchaeology and Archaeology Project” in southern Peru (Dept. of Arequipa), and the director of the “Bioarchaeology Project of Ancient Populations of Ayacucho”. She also co-directs the project, “Reconstructing Biosocial (Pre)Histories in the Andes”, with Dr. Marshall Summar (Vanderbilt Medical Center and Center for Human Genetics Research); this research entails the analysis of culturally contextualized ancient mtDNA and modern mtDNA from Andean populations. Aside from these primary projects, Dr. Tung is also the Project Bioarchaeologist for the “Conchopata Archaeological Project” in the central Andes (Dept. of Ayacucho) and the “Ancient Tuti Archaeological Project” in the Colca valley of southern highland Peru. Some of her articles include: “Trauma and Violence in the Wari Empire of the Peruvian Andes: Warfare, Raids, and Ritual Fights” (American Jrnl of Physical Anthropology, 2007); “The Village of Beringa at the Periphery of the Wari Empire: A Site Overview and New Radiocarbon Dates” (Andean Past, Vol. 8); “From Corporeality to Sanctity: Transforming Bodies into Trophy Heads in the Prehispanic Andes”, in the volume, “The Taking and Displaying of Human Trophies by Amerindians” (Springer Press, 2007); “Violence and Rural Lifeways at Two Peripheral Wari Sites in the Majes Valley of Southern Peru” (T. Tung and B. Owen) in the volume “Andean Archaeology, Vol. III” (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press, 2006); “Intermediate Elite Agency in the Wari Empire: The Bioarchaeological and Mortuary Evidence” (T. Tung and A. Cook) in the volume, “Intermediate Elites” (University of Arizona Press, 2006).As part of Dr. Tung’s commitment to public anthropology, she is a consultant for the Discovery Channel and has appeared in 9 episodes of a Discovery Channel series entitled “Mummy Autopsy”.  WERNKE, Steven (Ph.D. 2003, University of Wisconsin-Madison) Dr. Wernke is an archaeologist and historical anthropologist with interests in community organization, landscape and land-use, and the transformation of religious forms and practices during prehispanic and colonial times in the Andean region of Research Associate NETHERLY, Patricia (Ph.D. Cornell University, 1977) Dr. Netherly’s research brings together archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnology to study the cultural development of societies in the Andes and Amazonia over time. Her theoretical interests include the socio-political organization and the political economy of archaic states with particular reference to the Andes, modalities of complexity in pre-state societies, the cultural ecology of the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene in South America and well as in later periods. She has taught at the State University of New York, Fredonia and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru. She directed two long-term research projects in Ecuador: the Proyecto Arqueológico Tahuin on the coast of El Oro province under the sponsorship of the Banco Central del Ecuador, and the Proyecto Arqueológico del Oriente in Ecuadorian Amazonia under the sponsorship of the Fundación Alexander von Humboldt in Quito where she was Executive Director. She has also co-directed the Proyecto Zaña-Niepos in Northern Peru. She has edited two books and published numerous articles. She is finishing a book on the political structure of the polities of the North Coast of Peru and has in hand a study of the archaeology of the Western Amazon. Her future field research will continue to address the problems which have engaged her in the past in a series of small, focused projects. AffiliatedBARZ, Gregory (Ph.D. 1997, Brown University, M.A. 1992, University of Chicago)
Prof. Barz is associate professor of ethnomusicology and anthropology and the Recordings Review Editor for The World of Music. He currently focuses on HIV/AIDS and musical performances in Uganda. He is co-editor of Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Oxford) and Mashindano! Competitive Music Performance in East Africa (Mkuki na Nyota). His books include Music in East Africa: The Performance of Tradition and Modernity (2004, Oxford) and Singing for Life: HIV/AIDS and Music in Uganda (2006, Routledge). Editions Rodopi (Amsterdam) published his ethnography of East African choral communities, Performing Religion: Negotiating Past and Present in Kwaya Music of Tanzania, in 2003. In 2007 he released a CD recording with Smithsonian Folkways called Singing for Life: Songs of Hope, Healing, and HIV/AIDS in Uganda. Most recently he was a Senior Research Fellow in the AIDS Research Program of the Fulbright Fellowship Program. GAY, Volney (Ph.D. Chicago) Volney P. Gay is Professor of Religion, Professor of Psychiatry, and Professor of Anthropology. Professor Gay's research interests are in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, the psychodynamic study of culture, the comparative history of religions, and the psychology of religion. He is author of Reading Freud: Neurosis, Psychology, Religion; Reading Jung: Science, Psychology, and Religion; Freud on Ritual; and Understanding the Occult. His most recent book, Freud on Sublimation: Reconsiderations, won the Heinz Hartmann Award from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. JAUREGUI, Carlos A (Ph.D. 2001, University of Pittsburgh) Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Anthropology. SHUBHRA, Sharma (Ph.D.) Associate Director and Senior Lecturer, Women's and Gender Studies EmeritusSPORES, Ronald (Ph.D. Harvard) StaffMain Anthropology OfficeSally Miller, Administrative Assistant, (615) 343-6120 Nancy Middleton, Administrative Assistant, (615) 343-6120
Professor Dillehay's OfficeProfessor Demarest's Office |
