Meet the authors of the 66-3 issue, July 2024.
Alex V. Barnard holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University. His work examines how distinctive policies and classificatory practices shape the trajectories of people with severe mental illness in France and the United States. He is the author of Conservatorship: Inside California’s System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness (Columbia University Press, 2023) and Freegans: Diving Into the Wealth of Food Waste in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Matthew Benson is a social and economic historian in the Conflict & Civicness Research Group (CCRG) at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He is also the Sudans Research Director within the CCRG. He earned his Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded Ph.D. in History from Durham University in 2020. His current research interests are in changing global conflict and peace dynamics. He is working on his first book, about the histories of South Sudan and Sudan’s state revenue complexes and the shifting nature of war, state and armed group finance, and state formation in the twenty-first century. Other projects include research on global fragmentation and the ethics of research in difficult places.
Elizabeth Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of Environmental History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research engages with the history of energy, infrastructure, and capitalism, with a particular focus on India from 1900 to the present. Her recent and upcoming publications cover a wide range of topics, from gender and early solar energy to manmade earthquakes. She is currently completing her first scholarly book, “Electric Democracy: An Energy History of India from Colonialism to Climate Change.”
Brent Crosson is a socio-cultural anthropologist of religion, secularism, migration, and politics. His research has focused on contestations over the limits of legal power, science, race, and religion in the Americas. His first book—Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad—published with University of Chicago Press (2020), won the 2021 Clifford Geertz Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Religion and was shortlisted for the Albert J. Raboteau Prize for the best book in Africana religions. His research on Caribbean spiritual practices of problem-solving and legal intervention—known as obeah, spiritual work, or science—has been published in a number of journals, including Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Ethnos, The Journal of Africana Religions, and Anthropological Quarterly. His special issue of the journal Ethnos—“What Possessed You? ”—explores the relationship between spirit possession, material possessions, and conceptions of self. His work on race relations has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly and the Duke University Press journal Small Axe, and won that journal’s Question of the Social Sciences award. The journals American Religion and Anthropology and Humanism have published his award-winning ethnographic poetry. His current research project, The Other Anthropocene, focuses on climate change, religion, migration, and conceptions of energy, with chapters on these issues in edited volumes, including Climate Politics and the Power of Religion (Indiana University Press, 2022)and Critical Approaches to Science and Religion (Columbia University Press, 2023). His work on Venezuela and migration has appeared in the Guardian and Sociology Lens.
Rémi Hadad is an archaeologist and an anthropologist working on the Neolithic of the Eastern Mediterranean and Southwest Asia, where he conducted fieldworks in Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, and Oman. He is also interested in better defining what could be the specific contributions of archaeology—its methods, its sensibility, its reasonings—to the social sciences and humanities. A doctor of the University of Paris-Nanterre and previously a fellow of the Fyssen Fondation at the UCL Institute Archaeology in London, he is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès, as a member of the Joint Research Unit TRACES (UMR 5608) and a lecturer at the Archaeology and Art History Department. His first book, simultaneously a study of the construction of the Neolithic Revolution as an intellectual category and an introduction to its unsettling archaeological reality in the Fertile Crescent, is soon to be published in French at Le Seuil.
Miyako Inoue is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, where she specializes in linguistic anthropology and the anthropology of Japan. She authored Vicarious Language: the Political Economy of Gender and Speech in Japan (University of California Press, 2006) and is completing a book manuscript titled “Stenographer’s Invisible Hand: How Speech Became Language in Modern Japan.” Drawing on extensive ethnographic and archival research focusing on shorthand stenographers in the National Diet and court stenographers operating the stenographic typewriter, her upcoming work examines the role of stenography, its techniques, and its mediality in transforming modern Japanese by rendering “speech” commensurable with written language. Beyond these linguistic developments, the book unpacks the politico-semiotic rationality embedded in stenographic techniques and their verbatim record production, and to illuminate stenography’s broader historical role in shaping modern Japanese publics.
Aaron Kappeler is Lecturer in Anthropology of Development and Admissions Director for the Ph.D. in International Development at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on resource politics, energy, agriculture, food, and environmental struggles in Latin America. For the past fifteen years he has carried out fieldwork on state enterprises and cooperatives in Venezuela. His latest project explores social profit mechanisms and economic calculation in Venezuelan industry. Before joining the University of Edinburgh, he was Visiting Assistant Professor at Union College, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, and Instructor in Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
Sun Joo Kim is the Harvard-Yenching Professor of Korean History in Harvard’s Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Her research focuses on the socio-cultural history of Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). Both her college experience in 1980s Korea and a broad interest in the world history of revolutions and rebellions influenced her study of popular movements in nineteenth-century Korea, which in turn led her to analyze regional discrimination and ways in which marginalized groups historically coped with their compromised conditions. Her interest in ordinary but forgotten people, including women, led her to study legal records that inadvertently preserved their voices. She has also studied slavery, kinship and genealogy, and art history. Kim is also dedicated to making underused primary sources available in English through both conventional and digital publishing. Her books include Marginality and Subversion in Korea: The Hong Kyŏngnae Rebellion of 1812 (University of Washington Press, 2007); Voice from the North: Resurrecting Regional Identity through the Life and Work of Yi Sihang (1672–1736) (Stanford University Press, 2013); Wrongful Deaths: Selected Inquest Records from Nineteenth-Century Korea (with Jungwon Kim; University of Washington Press, 2014); and Yu Tae-ch’ing Family Documents (Yu Tae-ch’ing ka komunsŏ) (Minsokwon, 2021). Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Social History, Journal of Social History, Historische Anthropologie, Journal of Asian Studies, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, and Journal of Korean Studies, as well as Korean-language journals. She has received various fellowships and grants, most notably the American Council of Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship, the Korea Foundation Advanced Research Grant, and the Social Science Research Council Doctoral Research Fellowship. She has overseen several projects, including the Harvard Korean Alumni Biographies Project, the lecture series Korean Treasures at Harvard, and the research resource website Gateway to Premodern Korean Studies. Kim has also collaborated with colleagues on a series of workshops on Korean art history and the “New Frontiers in Premodern Korean Studies Workshop.”
Ramnarayan S. Rawat is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware. He is currently completing his second book, “The Language of Liberalism: The Dalit Public Sphere in Late-Colonial India,” and he has co-edited the second Dalit Studies volume, “Journeys of Dignity: Religion, Freedom, and Caste,” which is under review. He co-edited Dalit Studies (2016) with K. Satyanarayana. His first book, Reconsidering Untouchability: Chamars and Dalit History in North India, received the 2009 Joseph W. Elder Book prize awarded by the American Instituted of Indian Studies, and Honorable Mention in the 2013 Bernard Cohn book prize awarded by the Association of Asian Studies. The Hindi translation of Reconsidering Untouchability will appear in 2024.
