We ended the year (2023-2023) with a department party at Naveeda’s, catered by Panache Fine Catering. Among the plenty of good news shared were the accomplishments of our faculty, staff and students. Here are some of them:
Our first year graduate students had a bumper crop of summer research grants:
Omotayo Adenugba received the Sidney Mintz Summer Fellowship, the Chloe Center Summer Research Grant, and the Osmundsen Summer Research Grant for “The Evolution of Blackgold: Ecologies of Water, Sound, and Legality in Ogoni, Nigeria.”
Kaushal Bodwal received the Sidney Mintz Summer Fellowship, the Women, Gender, Sexuality Summer Research Fellowship and the Osmundsen Summer Research Grant for “Understanding Trans Futures: A Comparative Analysis of Trans and Intersex Care Based Institutions and Activism in Baltimore, USA, and Chennai, India.”
Julia Alves da Costa received the Sidney Mintz Summer Fellowship, and the Osmundsen Summer Research Grant for “Rethinking Nature During Climate Change: An Ethnography on Regeneration Projects.”
Sasha Kramer received the Medicine, Science and the Humanities Research Fellowship and the Osmundsen Summer Research Grant. She also had a peer-reviewed paper published in Medical Anthropology Quarterly entitled “Affective Economies in Crowdfunding for Cancer.”
Our second year graduate students are returning for fieldwork with generous grant support:
Rini Barman received the East Asian Studies Summer Grant, the Osmundsen Summer Research Grant, the Chloe Center Summer Research Grant, and the Women, Gender, Sexuality Summer Research Fellowship for “Entanglements of Heritage Brews with Tribal Women in Postcolonial Assam: Studying Masculinity, Racialized Labor and Community Practices in Northeast India.”
Sophie D’Anieri received the Sidney Mintz Grant for her “Confluences of the Domestic: Politics of Food, Violence, and Labor in Peri-Urban Mexico.”
Siwon Lee received the East Asian Studies Summer Grant and the Osmundsen Summer Research Grant for for her “Joseon Palaces and the Shifting Urban Landscapes.”
Congratulations are due to our third year students who received external fellowships:
Yida Jiao received a Wenner Gren fellowship award for “The Frontier of Technocratic Capitalism: Chinese Agricultural Entrepreneurs in Uzbekistan.”
Jonas Johnson received a Wenner Gren Fellowship award for “The Gunsmith: Curation and Technologies in America’s Gun Cultures.”
Jiwon Kim received a Wenner Gren Fellowship award for “Banking on Waste: Financialization and Householding in Indonesia.”
Among our ABDs
Talia Katz, Heba Islam, Perry Maddox, and Sarah Roth won the Dean’s Teaching Fellowships. Talia will teach a class titled “Trauma & the Feminine: Anthropological Approaches to The Study of Catastrophic Violence.” Heba will teach a class titled “Cultures of Surveillance.” Perry will teach a class titled “What is Climate Change? Anthropological Perspectives” and Sarah Roth received the Dean’s Teaching Fellowship for “Cancer Care in the U.S.: Poetics, Inequality, Ethnography.”
Talia Katz’s review of Sam Spinner’s Jewish Primitivism was published in Anthropology Quarterly.
Kunal Joshi and Benita Menezes have won teaching fellowships in the University Writing Program. Kunal will teach a course titled “Memes and Metaculture: Criticism in the Age of Content” and Benita will teach a class titled “Reintroduction to Writing: Architectures of Writing.”
Marios Falaris and Nat Adams have been selected for the JHU Society of Fellows in the Humanities.
Sumin Myung has accepted a faculty position in the Department of Anthropology, Victoria University at Wellington, New Zealand.
Among our staff, we have recently been joined by Casey Rastegar in the position of administrative coordinator and Pamela McCullough in the position of budget analyst. We are now a full shop. Congratulations to Khaleel Gheba, our academic program coordinator extraordinaire, for getting us there. Among our faculty, Scott MacLochlainn has received the Agora Grant for “AI, New Publics, and the Ethics of Language.” Veena Das’s book Life and Words has been translated into Italian and a conference held in her honor. Naveeda Khan’s book River Life and the Upspring of Nature won the second prize for the Victor Turner Book Prize. Valeria Procupez won the Center for Social Concern Engaged Scholar Faculty and Community Partner Fellow for 2024-2025.