Keynote Speaker
Fredrik Barth is a Professor of Anthropology at Boston University and at the University of Oslo. He has published numerous articles in the field of anthropology. He is best-known for his publications from the Middle East, Political Leadership among Swat Pathans, Nomads of South Persia, and Sohar: Culture and Society in an Omani Town and some of his important contributions to theory, Models of Social Organization and Ethnic Groups and Boundaries as well as the ethnographies from New Guinea and Bali. His 1969 classic, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, has been highly influential in the fields of cultural sociology, race and ethnicity, and anthropology.
Discussants
Margaret Crawford is Professor of Urban Design and Planning Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research focuses on the evolution, uses and meanings of urban space. Her book, Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns, examines the rise and fall of professionally designed industrial environments. She edited The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life and Everyday Urbanism, and has published numerous articles on shopping malls, public space, and other issues in the American built environment. Before coming to the GSD, Crawford was the Chair of the History, Theory and Humanities program at the Southern California Institute for Architecture. She has also taught at the University of Southern California, the University of California at San Diego, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Florence, Italy.
Selwyn R. Cudjoe is a Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College. Dr. Cudjoe is the author of Beyond Boundaries: The Intellectual Tradition of Trinidad and Tobago in the Nineteenth Century; Afro-Trinbagonians: No Longer Blinded by Our Eyes; V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading; Movement of the People: Essays on Independence; Resistance and Caribbean Literature; and The Role of Resistance in the Caribbean Novel. He has edited Caribbean Women Writers (Calaloux, University of Massachusetts, 1990); Eric Williams Speaks and co-edited C.L.R. James: His Intellectual Legacy. He also edited a new edition of Maxwell Philip's Emmanuel Appadocca. Dr. Cudjoe is a member of the Board of Directors of the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago and has produced two documentaries on the Caribbean.
Michael Fortner is an Ph.D. candidate in the Government Department at Harvard. He received his BA in Political Science and African-American Studies from Emory University in 2001. Michael studies the intersection of American politics and political philosophy -- particularly in the areas of race, ethnicity, and class. He also examines issue of race, ethnicity, and class from a comparative perspective. Currently, Michael is beginning his dissertation which examines the development of racial politics in London and New York over the 20th Century. He was recently a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics.
Michèle Lamont is currently Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. The prime focus of Michèle Lamont's research has been how culture is used to create and maintain boundaries between categories of people and how these symbolic boundaries generate and perpetuate social and economic inequality. Some of her published works related to culture and inequality include Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class (1992) and The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (2000). Some of her other research focuses on comparative sociology, contemporary sociological theory, and definitions of excellence in higher education. She is currently at work on a book about how people who serve on funding panels in the social sciences and the humanities understand academic excellence. She is also conducting a comparative study of anti-racist rhetoric across societies that present markedly different systems of inequality.
Malinda Maynor Lowery is assistant professor of history at Harvard. She is interested in issues of race, class, and the institution of segregation. She studies Native American history, meaning the narratives of Native lives and tribal communities mostly from their own points of view. She is particularly interested in 20th century experiences and Native American identity in the southeastern United States, and is finishing a book about Lumbee identity and federal recognition in the first half of the twentieth century.
Kimberly McClain DaCosta, an assistant professor of African and African American studies and of social studies at Harvard University, is interested in the intersection of cultural ideas about race and family. She is currently writing a book about efforts to create multiracial collective identity in the United States, based on interviews and fieldwork with members of organizations for interracial families and people of mixed descent.
Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. An historian by training, he has specialized in the excavation of issues that have contemporary policy implications. His 1986 book, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts, was awarded three scholarly prizes. His most recent book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Keyssar is coauthor of Inventing America, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history, as well as coeditor of a series on Comparative and International Working-Class History. In 2004/5, Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission onVoting and Elections. Keyssar's current research interests include election reform, the history of democracies, and the history of poverty.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay, G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies is Graduate Advisor in Ethnomusicology. B.M. (1970), M.A. (1972), and Ph.D. (1977), University of Michigan. She taught at Columbia University (1977-1982), New York University (1982-1990), and Wesleyan University (1990-1992), before joining the Harvard faculty in 1992. At Harvard, she has served as Chair of the Department of Music (1994-1999, acting chair, spring 2002) and is active in interdisciplinary studies across several domains, including African Studies, Ethnic Studies, the Arts, and the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Interfaculty Initiative. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy for Jewish Research, she is a Past President of the Society for Ethnomusicology. A Congressional appointee to the Board of Trustees of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, she was Chair of that Board from 2002-2004. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, and has been a fellow at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center, the Liguria Study Center for the Arts and Humanities, and the Civitella Ranieri Center.
Andreas Wimmer is Professor of Sociology at the University of California Los Angeles and currently Visiting Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He also directs a comparative program on ethnicity and nationalism at UCLA’s International Institute. His research aims at understanding the dynamics of ethnicity, nation-state formation and political conflict from a comparative perspective. He has pursued this interest through a variety of social science disciplines, focusing on examples from both the developing and the developed world, and using different methodological and analytical strategies: anthropological field research (in Mexico and Iraq), social network studies (in Swiss immigrant neighborhoods), quantitative cross-national research (on wars in the modern world), comparative historical analysis, and policy oriented research related to immigrant minorities and the prevention of ethnic conflict. His main other research areas are theories of culture and social change.
Graduate Student Presenters
Patricia Banks is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at Harvard University. Her research interests focus broadly on cultural consumption and production, and more narrowly on race and visual art. Based on 103 in-depth interviews with blacks in the New York and Atlanta metropolitan areas, and photographs of art displayed in their homes, Patricia's dissertation offers the first systematic examination of black consumption of visual art. Her next project examines how institutions shape the meanings attached to visual art produced by artists of African descent.
Jovonne Bickerstaff is a native of Akron, Ohio & alumna of the University of Cambridge (MPhil Social Psychology, St. John?s College) & MIT (BS Urban Studies & Planning, BS Writing & Humanistic Studies). Her current research, began while a Fulbright grantee to France, explores identity, ambitions and social integration among French of Sub-Saharan origins, particularly how hegemonic representations of "being French" establish symbolic & social boundaries that constrain social integration and self-identification. Her research interests include the role of representations & ideologies in perpetuating social inequality, intercultural & gender communication fracture, transnational perspectives on race/ethnicity, & minorities in higher education.
Sarah Darghouth is currently a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology at Boston University. Recipient of a Presidential University Graduate Fellowship, she is involved in research projects with a focus on children, psychopathology and culture. Her academic and clinical interests include racism and discrimination in minority populations, refugee and immigrant groups in the US. She received her M.Sc. with the Dean's Honors in Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). Her Masters dissertation involved fieldwork in Peru where she explored the meanings of headache for women living in conditions of poverty in rural and urban areas.
John Davenport is a Ph.D. student in Geography at the University of Kentucky. His interests fall primarily under the rubrics of historical geography and cultural landscape studies. His current research is centered on a neighborhood and historic district in New Orleans, Louisiana named Bywater. While pursuing an M.A. in Geography at California State University Northridge he examined the built environment of Manzanar, a WWII internment camp for Japanese Americans. He holds a B.A. in Geography from the University of Oklahoma. Mr. Davenport may be contacted at jjdavenport@uky.edu.
Andrew Deener is a graduate student in the department of sociology at UCLA. For the past three years, he has been working on an ethnographic and historical project about the effects of neighborhood changes upon residents of Venice, California, a multi-cultural and multi-class neighborhood in the city of LosAngeles. His current research focuses on the categorization of difference along the lines of class, culture, and cohort, the challenges these categories pose to political inclusion, and the processes and effects of distinct forms of social exclusion.
Crystal Marie Fleming is a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University. She is a Ford Foundation Doctoral Fellow and a continuing Mellon Mays Minority Fellow. In 2004, she graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with degrees in French and Sociology. With Michele Lamont, she is co-author of "Everyday Antiracism: Competence and Religion in the Cultural Repertoire of the African-American Elite", published in the Du Bois Review (2005). She is currently working on several projects, including an ethnographic examination of the slam poetry and spokenword scene and an institutional analysis of the nature of intellectual authority. Her research interests include culture, ethnic boundaries, inequality, theory and France/U.S. comparisons.
Trinidad Gonzales is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Houston, and a Latino Predoctorial Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. His dissertation “The World of México Texanos, Mexicanos, and México Americanos: Colonization and Construction of Transnational and United States Nationalist Identities in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1900-1930” examines three distinct ethnic Mexican group identities as found in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. His research areas include Chicana/o History, Borderland History, Identity and Culture. Currently Gonzales is interrogating the notion of “Latina/o” as a category of analysis.
Ervin Kosta is a Ph.D. student in sociology at CUNY Graduate Center. Born in Albania, he completed his undergraduate studies in sociology at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, and attended the one-year master programe in Economy and Society at CEU in Warsaw, Poland. Research interests include urban sociology, globalization theory, and immigration. His current research focuses on different shopping streets in NYC.
Tracy Matsuo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on ethno-cultural participation and cultural consumption. She, along with Eric Fong, co-authored the chapter on Asian groups in Canada in the book, The New Face of Asian Pacific America: Numbers, Diversity and Change in the 21st Century. She also co-wrote the section on “Canadian Families” in The International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family Relationships with Lorne Tepperman.
Asher Ragen completed his undergraduate studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he majored in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. He is currently completing a PhD at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, where he is writing about Mesopotamian temple slavery in the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods . His research interests include the social and intellectual history of Babylonia during the first millennium BCE, as well as the relations between Second Temple Judaism and Mesopotamian culture.
Christy Rogers is a research assistant at the Kirwan Institute for the Study
of Race and Ethnicity and a doctoral candidate in Geography at The Ohio
State University. A native of Athens, Ohio, Christy has her undergraduate
degree in English from Carleton College, her graduate degree in English from
Ohio University, and her professional degree in Landscape Architecture from
the Harvard Design School. She worked in Chicago for five years before starting work on her Ph.D. Her research will focus on the intersections of race, land tenure, and processes of governmentality in the 19th Century.
Matt Sakakeeny is a Ph.D candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He came to New York from New Orleans, where he was the producer of the public radio show American Routes. His dissertation project will focus on cultural practices in the streets of New Orleans, including "second line" parades, jazz funerals, and Mardi Gras Indian ceremonies, and the cultural responses to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Matt's paper about racial positionings in New York City afrobeat performances draws from his M.A. thesis.
Tony Tian-Ren Lin is a graduate student at the University of Virginia. His primary research interest includes culture, religion and Latino/a sociology. He is currently involved in an ethnographical study on Latino churches. He received his undergraduate degree from Boston University and two degrees, a Master of Divinity and a Master of Theology, from Princeton Theological Seminary. Before entering the doctoral program at the University of Virginia, he was the associate pastor of a Presbyterian church in New Jersey. Tony was born in Taiwan and grew up in Argentina.
Isaac Weiner is a doctoral student in Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the intersection of religion and American public life. He is particularly interested in the implications of religious diversity for American law, politics, and public policy. Isaac received his B.A. in Religious Studies from Yale University and his M.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill. He is originally from Newton, MA.
Conference Organizers
Lydia Bean received her BA in Spanish and Music from Austin College, a small liberal arts school in Sherman, Texas. Her undergraduate Honors Thesis compared the production and distribution of two Cuban slave narratives. During college, she helped found Friends of Justice, a faith-based grassroots coalition that fought to overturn a poorly-managed drug sting that arrested 20% of her town's Black adults. In her free time, she plays guitar and sings with the Dudley House Traditional Music Ensemble. Her Qualifying Paper identifies the cultural models that street-level bureaucrats use to talk about citizenship, and how these constructions articulate with their everyday practices.
Marc Gidal, a double-bassist and Ph.D. student in the Music Department, studies ethnomusicology, jazz, Indian music, and Brazilian music. He has previously studied at Tufts University (M.A. Music), the University of Oregon (B.S. Religious Studies), the Hebrew University, and Berklee College of Music, and has taught at Northeastern University.
Michael Jeffries is a doctoral candidiate in African and African American studies, whose research interests include Black American identity and hip hop culture. He holds a B.A. from Swarthmore College in Sociology/Anthropology.
Helen B. Marrow received her B.A. in Sociology and Latin American Studies from Princeton University (2000) before joining the Departments of Sociology and Social Policy at Harvard. Her research interests include immigration, race and ethnicity, social stratification and inequality, Latinos in the United States, and qualitative research methods. She has recently published on second-generation Brazilians in the United States (Ethnicities, 2003) and new U.S. immigrant destinations (Perspectives on Politics, December 2005). Along with Mary C. Waters (Sociology, Harvard University) and Reed Ueda (History, Tufts University), she is also co-editor and research assistant for the forthcoming volume The New Americans: A Guide to Immigration Since 1965 (Harvard University Press, 2006), in which she authors the entry on South Americans. Her current dissertation research project is a local (2 county)-level comparative study of the economic, sociocultural, and political incorporation of new Latin American immigrants and U.S.-born Hispanics/Latinos in the rural and small-town U.S. South. During 2005-06, she is enrolled as a traveling scholar from the friendly city of Philadelphia, where she is broadening her horizons by taking an introductory Mandarin course. And in the winter of 2006, she will be a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change.
Mark Pachucki is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology. His research is broadly concerned with the causal implications of creative culture, with a focus on how the arts have historically been associated with our collective identities and national identity as Americans. Other current projects include looking at how art professionals assess quality and evaluate "greatness" among museums, and how cancer survivorship networks have emerged in recent years and share similarities with social movement and other medical social support networks. Currently a Teaching Fellow, Mark serves as the organizer of the Professional Development panel series, a recent initiative by the department's Graduate Student Organization. A proud New Yorker, he recently refused to surrender his NYS license in order to obtain a MA driver's license. Whether this constructively aids in his understanding of how different types of boundaries are created, imposed, defended, bridged, subverted, and transformed remains an open question.
Sabrina Pendergrass received her A.B. in Sociology and a certificate in African American Studies from Princeton University in 2002. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at Harvard and a Doctoral Fellow in the Multidisciplinary Program in Inequality and Social Policy at the JFK School of Government. Her broad interests include cultural sociology, inequality, race and ethnicity, race and American politics, and qualitative methods. Her most recent research has focused on inequality and the contested meanings of American identity, including the role of collective memory. Her qualifying paper involves in-depth interviews with native-born black men about how they draw and bridge the boundaries of a black identity and an American identity.
Yael Schacher is a PhD candidate in Harvard's History of American Civilization Program. She specializes in the history and literature of immigration and has recently begun her dissertation project on refugees and the changing meaning of refuge in the United States in the 20th century. She has a B.A. in English and American literature from Columbia University and an M.A. in History from Harvard University.
