MIT Anthropology - Department News


	May 2012 Graham Jones has won the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for Excellence in Teaching in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
	March 2012 Erica James has received the Levitan Prize in the Humanities. See the MIT News article here. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
	September 2011 Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti by Erica James received an Honorable Mention for the Society for Cultural Anthropology Gregory Bateson Prize. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
	July 2011 Stefan Helmreich has been prmooted to Professor of Anthropology. Associate Professor Heather Paxson has been granted tenure.
	March 2011 David Harvey, author of The Condition of Postmodernity and professor in the Program in Anthropology at the City University of New York, examines the latest financial crisis and the complexities of global capital flow from a Marxist perspective. Event details.
	November 2010 Stefan Helmreich has won the American Ethnological Society Senior Book Prize for Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Heather Paxson's article, "Cheese Cultures: Transforming American Tastes and Traditions," published in the Fall 2010 issue of Gastronomica http://www.gastronomica.org/index.html , won an 'honorable mention' in the 2010 Sophie Coe Prize competition in Food History, awarded by the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.
	October 2010 Erica James has been featured in the Harvard Gazette.
	September 2010 Stefan Helmreich has won the second annual Gregory Bateson Prize for Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. More information can be found at http://sca.culanth.org/prizes/bateson/bateson.htm.
	July 2010 Graham Jones joins us as Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Erica James has been selected to be the holder of the Class of 1947 Career Development Professorship.
	May 2010 Erica James has published Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. Monitoring The Rights of Native Peoples, a class taught by James Howe, has been spotlighted in MIT News.
	November 2009 Chris Walley and Chris Boebel have released a trailer for their new Spring 2010 course "21A.339J DV Lab: Documenting Science through Video and New Media" - see it here! James Howe has published Chiefs, Scribes, and Ethnographers: Kuna Culture from Inside and Out.
	July 2009 Jean Jackson's article co-authored with María Clemencia Ramírez, "Traditional, transnational and cosmopolitan: The Colombian Yanacona look to the past and to the future" has been published in American Ethnologist.
	June 2009 Erica James has been promoted to Associate Professor of Anthropology, effective July 2009. Jean Jackson gave her report, "The Awá of Southern Colombia: a "Perfect Storm" of Violence", to the American Anthropological Association's Committee for Human Rights. Heather Paxson has received the Belasco Prize for Scholarly Excellence from the Association for the Study of Food and Society for "Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States," which was published in Cultural Anthropology 23(1):15-47. She is the very first recipient of this award. Stefan Helmreich has won MIT's Levitan Teaching Prize in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Susan Silbey has been honored with the 2009 Harry J. Kalven Jr. Prize by the Law and Society Association.
	February 2009 Stefan Helmreich has published Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. See the MIT News Office article with video here.
	September 2008 Heather Paxson has been selected to be the holder of the Class of 1957 Career Development Professorship.
	July 2008 Susan Silbey has been named the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities. Professor Silbey has also edited the recently published Law and Science, Volumes I and II through Ashgate Publishing. Manduhai Buyandelger joins us as Assistant Professor of Anthropology.
	April 2008 Susan Silbey has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Heather Paxson is the 2008 recipient of Levitan Prize in the Humanities, for "Economies of Sentiment, Ecologies of Production: Crafting American Artisanal Cheese" as well as one of 2 recipients of the 2008 Everett Moore Baker Memorial Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
	February 2008 Heather Paxson has been promoted to Associate Professor of Anthropology, effective July 2008.
	June 2007 Jean Jackson attended the American Ethnological Society annual meetings in Toronto, Canada. She presented "Traditional, transnational and cosmopolitan: the Yanacona of Huila , Colombia , look to the past and to the future" for a session on "From strategic essentialism to essential strategies: Indigeneities and governmentalities in Latin America." Additionally, Professor Jackson served as a discussant for a session on "Beyond Authenticity: Indigenous Cosmopolitanism." Heather Paxson has been appointed Assistant Professor of Anthropology, and will begin this new position on July 1st, 2007. Additionally, she has been awarded the 2007 Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Post-Ph.D. Research Grant for " Economies of Sentiment, Ecologies of Production: Crafting Locality in American Artisanal Cheesemaking." Erica James presented "Report on the History and Ethnography of the Catholic Charities Haitian Multi-Service Center" and "The United States and Haiti: Human Rights, Democracy, and Security" at the Haitian Multi-Service Center in Dorchester, MA.
	December 2006 Erica James presented "Ruptures, Rights, and Repair: The Politics of Truth in Haiti" at the Justice in the Mirror: Law, Culture, and the Making of History Symposium at Yale University.
	September 2006 Jean Jackson attended a conference on "Longevity & Optimal Health: Integrating Eastern & Western Perspectives." Her paper, titled "'Extreme behaviors' resulting from integrated body/mind disciplines: The cross-cultural evidence," was part of a panel discussing "Protection." The conference took place at the Menla Mountain Retreat & Conference Center in Phoenicia, New York. The participants included His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Gehlek Rimpoche, Lasker prize recipient Elizabeth Blackburn, and Dean Ornish. A volume containing conference papers will be published by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Erica James presented "Causes and Consequences of Urban Violence" at the Haitian Ambassadorial Seminar for Janet A. Sanderson, Office of External Research, Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), U.S. Department of State and National Intelligence Council (NIC), Washington, D.C. Visiting Scholar Constance Perin has published a review of an edited volume of 18 articles on the Columbia shuttle disaster in Administrative Science Quarterly.
	June 2006 Heather Paxson gave a paper at the Meeting of the Agricultural History Society held at MIT titled "Sheep, Goats, and Cows: An Animal Anthropology of Artisanal Cheeses and their Landscapes." She also gave a paper at the Joint Meetings of the Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society and the Association for the Study of Food and Society at Boston University titled "Cultivating Terroir in American Artisanal Cheese Production."