Anthropology News • February 2009

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A S S O C I A T I O N B U S I N E S S

A s s o c i A t i o n B u s i n e s s

Introducing the Executive Program CommitteeJohn L Jackson, Jr ExEcutivE Program cochair

DEborah thomas ExEcutivE Program cochair

This month, as we review proposals for presiden-tial and executive sessions at the 2009 meeting in Philadelphia, we wanted to introduce you to the Executive Program Committee. We are a diverse group of anthropologists working within and across various subfields, and we are all committed to thinking about innovative ways to reach out with anthropology.

Deborah A Thomas is an associate professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica (2004), and coeditor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (2006) with Kamari Clarke. She is coeditor of the journal Transforming Anthropology, and is currently conducting research projects on violence and transnational labor migration. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.

John L Jackson, Jr, is the Richard Perry University Associate Professor of Communication and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School. His most recent book is Racial Paranoia (2008). Jackson is the coeditor of the journal Transforming Anthropology, and he is currently writing a “media ethnography” that examines Global Black Hebrewism.

Whitney Battle-Baptiste is an assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She received her PhD in anthropology from the University of Texas-Austin. She specializes in historical archaeology.

Philippe Bourgois is the Richard Perry University Professor of Anthropology and Family and Community Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He has conducted fieldwork in Central America and in the urban United States. His research in the United States confronts inner-city social suffering and critiques the political economy and cultural contours of US apartheid. He is also

addressing gender power relations and the intersec-tions between structural and intimate violence. His most recent research focuses on substance abuse, violence, homelessness and HIV-prevention. His forthcoming book is titled Righteous Dopefiend.

Vanessa Fong is an anthropologist in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. She is interested in how the experi-ences of a transnational cohort of Chinese only-children and their families shed light on theories of gender, citizenship, transnationalism, migra-tion, education and demographic, medical and psychological anthropology. She is currently in the early phases of a longitudinal project that follows members of this cohort throughout the course of their lives, and is also collaborating with psychologists and sociologist on a project in Nanjing, China examining relationships between parents’ socioeconomic trajectories, parenting beliefs and practices, and child devel-opment among over one thousand families.

Jonathan Marks is a professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte. He is interested in primate and human evolu-tion, race, molecular genetics and evolution, the history of studies of human evolution and varia-tion, the anthropology of science, and critical studies in human genetics. He has published numerous articles and several books including Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History (1995); What It Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes (2002); and Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge (forthcoming). He is also a Fellow in the American Association of the Advancement of Science.

Bob Preucel is a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a post-processual archaeologist who has focused on issues related to meaning and practice, semi-otics, materiality, landscape, gender and ethno-genesis within native North America and Pueblo cultures. He is a curator in the Penn Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, and is director of the Penn Center for Native American Studies. He is also an adjunct faculty member of the Graduate School of Education.

Ana Yolanda Ramos-Zayas is an associate professor of anthropology and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She is interested in

urban anthropology, race, citizenship, nation-alism, space and the built environment, youth and the anthropology of emotions, and has conducted research in the US, Puerto Rico and Brazil. She is the author of National Performances: Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago (2003) and coauthor of Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans and the Politics of Race and Citizenship (2003). She has published various articles on issues of citizenship, race, youth and space in relation to US Latinos and Latin American populations. Her current work focuses on race and conceptions of “urban competency” among Brazilian and Puerto Rican youth in Newark, NJ, Belo Horizonte (Brazil), and San Juan (Puerto Rico).

Kim Simmons is an assistant professor of anthropology and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. Her areas of interest are race, gender, class, identity forma-tion, migration and immigration, women and development, diaspora, and the forging of black ethnicities. She has conducted research in the US and the Dominican Republic, where she has focused on the cultural construction of gender and female identity as well as issues of racial-national identity formation and competing discourses surrounding Dominicanness in terms of race/color and racial/color identities.

David Sutton is an associate professor of sociocultural anthropology at Southern Illinois University. He is author of Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, which is based on over a decade of research on the Greek island of Kalymnos. He is currently completing a book project that looks at cinema anthropologically.

Roxanne Varzi is an assistant professor of anthropology and film and media studies at the University of California-Irvine. She is a core faculty member of the Culture and Theory PhD program and the Working Group in African and Middle Eastern Studies. She is also an affili-ated faculty member of the Samuel M Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, the UC-Irvine Undergraduate Program in Religious Studies, and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies. She conducts research in Iran, and has been researching and writing about the “culture” produced by the Iranian govern-ment during the Iran-Iraq war. She is author of Warring Souls (2006).

Diana Wells is president of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, a global association of “social entre-preneurs,” men and women who have developed solutions for the world’s most urgent social prob-lems. Ashoka elects social entrepreneurs, provides them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries in order to develop models for collaboration and social citizenship. Wells received her PhD from New York University in 2000 after conducting research on the ways women within feminist organizations in Trinidad were attempting to work across the ethnic differences that so often divide political allegiances within that country. She is on the Advisory Board for the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and on the Board of GuideStar International.

T h E E N d / S O f A N T h r O p O l O g y

December 2–6, 2009, AAA will meet in Philadelphia, PA under the theme “The End/s of Anthropology.” As association members, committees, sections and staff organize sessions and plan the program, check this space for news about the meeting venue, planned events and other topics related to the 108th Annual Meeting and its theme.