Home | About Us | People | Student Information | Courses | News | Resources | Research | Forms | UC Berkeley |
Events for Spring 2008
| Naomi Leite selected as 2007-2008 Teaching Effectiveness Award Winner |
Naomi Leite joins Jelani Mahiri (2005-2006) previously selected winner of this award, the highest made to a Graduate Student Instructor, whose award-winning essay can be viewed at: Award Essay Both Naomi Leite and Jelani Mahiri became eligible to compete for the Teaching Effectiveness Award by first receiving the Outstanding GSI Award. Other Anthropology recipients of the OGSI Award include: 2007-2008 2006-2007 2005-2006 2004-2005 2003-2004 2001-2002 2000-2001 1999-2000 1998-1999 |
| Medical Anthropology International Conference |
| International Conference on Global Values for Global Health coming to the University of California, Berkeley May 5th and 6th 2008. For more information see "Global Values for Global Health" conference flyer and brief summary. |
| Stanley Brandes has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship |
| Professor Stanley Brandes has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship to work on his project on "pets and their people". The University brief story is at http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/04/08_guggenheim.shtml |
| Ruth Tringham Receives "Chancellor's Award for Public Service 2007-2008" |
| Professor Ruth Tringham has been selected to receive the Chancellor's Award for Public Service for 2007-2008, in recognition of her work developing an After-School program with the Oakland Public Schools. |
| The Sixteenth Annual SOYUZ Symposium starts April 24th - 26th at UC Berkeley |
SOYUZ --The Research Network of Postsocialist Cultural Studies. “Contemporary Critical Inquiry Through the Lens of Postsocialism” The disintegration of Soviet and Eastern European socialisms not only ushered in rapid and overwhelming transformations in the former socialist lifeworlds, but also engendered the emergence of the problem-space of “postsocialism” that spans well beyond the boundaries of the former socialist states. In this year’s Soyuz conference, we would like to consider: how can theoretical insights gained in our critical engagements with postsocialism shed new light on questions central to contemporary anthropology and critical social inquiry more broadly. For example, how might our inquiry of postsocialism illuminate: • current global configurations of liberalism and neoliberalism, democracy and neo-conservatism, sovereignty and citizenship, biopower and international law, religion and secularism, risk and security, global capitalism and labor outsourcing? • complex parallels between late socialist and late capitalist social formations at the level of institutions, practices, sentiments, knowledge, subjectivity, aesthetics? • current postcolonial engagements (considering that the ideological opposition capitalism/socialism, in relation to which postcolonial The selected papers interrogate the relevance of the theoretical insights gained in engagements with postsocialism for other contexts, areas and problems of contemporary world. They will consider the implications of postsocialism, both as a historical formation and as a problem-space, for the problems interrogated in contemporary anthropology and social inquiry. The conference organizing committee: The symposium is generously sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute for Slavic, Eastern European and Eurasian Studies, the Townsend Center for Humanities, Dean of the Social Sciences Division in the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley, Berkeley Department of Anthropology, AGORA, and Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers (KAS). Please see conference webpage for more information, including conference program. |
| Margaret W. Conkey wins Award |
| Professor Margaret W. Conkey receives the 2007-2008 Berkeley Faculty Service Award of the Academic Senate. |
| Alexei Yurchak Wins the 2007 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize |
| Associate Professor Alexei Yurchak, Received the 2007 Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize for the book: Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press). The Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) is awarded annually for the most important contribution to Russian, Eurasian, and East European studies in any discipline of the humanities or social sciences published in English in the United States in the previous calendar year. |
Elana Shever Wins Schneider Prize |
The prestigious Shneider Prize has been awarded to Elana Shever by the American Anthropological Association. This award is given each year to a graduate student in anthropology in recognition of innovative work in the fields of kingship, culture theory, and American culture. Shever is being honored with this award for her paper, ""I am a petroleum product": Kinship, Sentiment and Capitalism in the Argentine Oil, Industry." |
Berkeley Archaeology Faculty Team Wins Henkin Citation for Diversity |
June 11, 2007 A team made up of Professors Margaret Conkey, Rosemary Joyce, Kent Lightfoot and Laurie Wilkie won the Leon A. Henkin Citation for Distinguished Service for exceptional commitment to the educational development of students from groups who are under-represented in the Academy. The recipients were selected by the Committee on Student Diversity and Academic Development of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate, a Committee founded in 1963 by Mathematics Professor Leon Henkin and other faculty concerned about the dearth of minority representation among the Berkeley Faculty. The award was created in the name of Leon Henkin to “indicate the highest levels of service toward the goals of increasing diversity in the professoriate and in the professions at large.” Leon Henkin, the first recipient in 1998, was active on the Committee, and advised it until shortly before his death in November 2006. The archaeology faculty team, nominated by Professor Tom Biolsi of the Department of Ethnic Studies, won the award for “…not only aggressively active in increasing the graduate student diversity within the Archaeology Program in their home department of Anthropology (25% minority graduate students in Anthropological Archaeology) but also responsible for changing the face of the archaeology discipline nationally in the number of mentored students now in faculty positions.” The archaeology team’s scholarship was further praised as “…[having] gone beyond the boundaries of traditional archaeology, and they have both led and been led by students to open this discipline to approaches and topics that enlighten us all while dramatically engaging students. Their impact is long term and sustained, and it brings these students into the Academy as was Leon Henkin’s dream.”
|
| "Stories in the Time of Cholera" Wins Top Anthropology Prize |
Charles L. Briggs, a University of California, Berkeley, anthropology professor, and Dr. Clara Mantini-Briggs, an associate researcher in UC Berkeley's Department of Demography, are the 2007 winners of the J.I. Staley Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the field of anthropology, for "Stories in the Time of Cholera: Racial Profiling During a Medical Nightmare," a book they co-authored.
|
| Anthropology Faculty Receive Carnegie Awards |
By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | May 2007
|
Nancy Scheper-Hughes to Recieve Sloan Coffin Award |
Berkeley — The first Berkeley William Sloan Coffin Jr. Awards recognizing moral leadership tied to the University of California, Berkeley, community will be bestowed on UC Berkeley scholars Robert N. Bellah and Nancy Scheper-Hughes in ceremonies on Thursday, April 12. Coffin, a chaplain at Yale University, was an activist in the civil rights and peace movements, and was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War and nuclear arms race. He died a year ago at the age of 81. Bellah is UC Berkeley’s Elliott Professor Emeritus of Sociology and an authority on religion. As an undergraduate, he belonged to the Communist Party and gained notoriety when he refused to identify other members when called before the Army-McCarthy Committee in the 1950s. As a result of his action, Bellah was denied a teaching post at Harvard University (where he had earned his M.A. and Ph.D.), and subsequently went to teach at McGill University's Institute for Islamic Studies in Canada for two years. After McCarthy died, Bellah was offered a lecturer’s job at Harvard. He came to UC Berkeley in 1967. He headed a team of sociologists and anthropologists who wrote about “civil religion” in “Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life” (1985). He traces his concern for the oppressed to the Hebrew tradition as well as the New Testament. Bellah received the National Humanities Medal from President Clinton in 2001 in recognition of his efforts to illuminate the importance of community in American society. Scheper-Hughes, a UC Berkeley professor of medical anthropology, is described as a “militant anthropologist” known for her extreme field research and her trenchant writings on the violence of every day life, including mother love and child death in the shantytowns of Brazil, schizophrenia in rural Ireland, AIDS and human rights in Cuba, death squads' extermination of street kids, the politics of violence and reconciliation in South Africa, and child sexual abuse, celibacy and the Catholic Church. Her life as a committed activist began in the early 1960s when she lived and worked in a large favela, or shantytown, in Northeast Brazil, followed by almost two years in rural Wilcox County, Ala., and in Selma, Ala., working as a civil rights worker with a focus on hunger and malnutrition among black tenant farmers. While a professor at UC Berkeley, she was an early member of the Berkeley Catholic Worker movement and participated in bringing the Peoples' Cafe into People’s Park to provide hot breakfasts and homemade soups and stews in a dignified, sheltered environment. A follower of the late activist Father Bill O'Donnell, she participates each year in the Good Friday demonstrations against the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory weapons’ research and has been arrested there several times. Scheper-Hughes also is a co-founder and director of Organs Watch, a medical human rights project, and advises the World Health Organization on issues relating to medical human rights abuses related to global organ and tissue transplantation. The committee that made the selections includes faculty from many faiths, campus staff and students, and First Congregational Church of Berkeley leaders. Additional Sloan Coffin awards also are handed out by the Yale Divinity School. |
| In Memoriam: George M. Foster |
Professor Emeritus George M. Foster passed away on May 18, 2006, and a memorial service was held earlier this Fall. During his life he made a profound impact on our department, its constituents, and the entire field of Anthropology. He will be missed. You can find more information about George Foster on this website and information about his work in Mexico here. |
| 290 Lecture Series |
Approximately six times per semester, the Department of Anthropology invites nationally renowned individuals in Anthropology or related fields to give a lecture for the Department. After the lecture faculty and graduate students gather for an hour of socializing and informal exchange about the lecture. Social Cultural and Archaeology graduate students are required to enroll in Anthropology 290 each semester they are registered before advancing to candidacy. See the Schedule for the 290 Lecture Series. |
Wednesday Noon Archaeology Bag Lunch Talks |
The Archaeology Research Facility sponsors this weekly event at the 2251 College Avenue building, in the Seminar Room. Discussion topics and more information can be found here.
|
Deleuze Conference on Media and Movement |
The Anthropology Department is hosting the Deleuze Conference on Media and Movement at the Faculty Club on November 3. For more information see this link.
|
| AGORA Graduate Student Brown Bag Presentations |
The schedule for these presentations can be found by clicking here. |
MedAnthro Lecture Series
Emeritus Lecture Series
Monthly Newsletter, BAM!