I heartily but belatedly welcome our new students and welcome back our returning students. I hope you all had a pleasant and productive summer and rewarding fall semester. I am pleased to report that the Anthropology Department continues to grow and develop in new and ex-citing ways. Our faculty and current and former students are involved in a number of impressive research and ser-vice efforts in the US and elsewhere. I urge you to read about their many accomplishments and awards in this newsletter.

We are very fortunate to have had Dr. Christopher N. Matthews join our department this past Fall (see article on next page). Dr. Matthews, a historical archaeologist, will be teaching existing courses and developing new courses including Historical Archaeology, Anthropology and Race, and two new fieldwork cours-es in Montclair and Long Island.

Because of the growth in the number of students and faculty, Dr. Brook, the Ad-vising Coordinator of the Department, who has almost single-handedly advised all our majors and minors will continue to do some advising and oversee the organization of the advising system. In this capacity he will assign students to all faculty members for advising. Where student interest is known and where it is possible, students will be as-signed to a faculty member with that interest. If students’ interests change, a new advi-sor can be assigned or selected. I strongly urge you to meet with your advisor. A re-cent study of advising at MSU found that students often do not meet with advisors. It is really very important that you do so. Students can look at their Analysis of Academic Progress reports on WESS and the course schedule for an upcoming semester on their own, but, without talking to an advisor, a student may not know what new courses are coming up, how to mix very challenging courses with less demanding ones, or what courses in other disciplines would be useful complements for their particular interests. Advisors also know about other opportunities on and off-campus, such as research grants and internships, career trajectories, study abroad, and field work and graduate programs.

I would like to thank all the students who have been responsible for organizing and running regular meetings of the Anthropology Club. Their work has made an im-portant contribution to Anthropology at MSU. Watch for announcements of meeting in the Spring semester. This is an excellent way to find out more about anthropology at MSU and elsewhere. Watch for a club meeting about graduate school.

Fran Rothstein

Letter From the Chair

ANTHROPOLOGY NEWS

SPRING 2013 Edited By: Sana Mirza

Inside this issue:

MONTCLAIR STATE UNIVERSITY

New Faculty Member 2

News From Students: Past and Present 2

Engaged Anthropology 4

Congratulations to 2012 Graduates! 5

Faculty News 6

DR. CHRISTOPHER MAT-THEWS (second from right) came to MSU from Adelphi Uni-versity in Garden City, Long Is-land. He is an historical archaeol-ogist with specialties in the ar-chaeology of the African Diaspo-ra, public archaeology, and the archaeology of landscape. He is author of two books: The Archae-ology of American Capitalism (2010) and An Archaeology of History and Tradition (2002) and co-editor of Ethnographic Ar-chaeologies: Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practice (2008). He has pub-

lished several book chapters and journal articles in Historical Ar-chaeology, Archaeologies, Jour-nal of Social Archaeology, and The Public Historian. He is also project co-director of “A Long Time Coming: The History and Archaeology of the Native and African American Community of Setauket, NY.” This year Profes-sor Matthews will be teaching Prehistoric Archaeology, Native North Americans and Cultural Anthropology. He will also be working on a new project to devel-op a historical archaeology field site in New Jersey.

Following graduation in 2006 (BA Anthropology, Archaeolo-gy), Jonathan Hanna worked in Cultural Resource Manage-ment for a variety of firms throughout NJ, NY, PA, MD, and TX- including the World Trade Center Forensic Recovery led by the NYC Office of Chief Medical Examiner from 2007-2008. He then worked in the Department of Membership and Development at the American Museum of Natural History, managing the membership database and hoping in vain to land a job in the Anthropology division.

(continued page 3)

New Faculty Member

Jonathan Hanna (2006)

News From Alumnae

Alumnae Event

The Department of Anthropology participated in the First Annual Alumnae Event . About ten people, includ-ing alumnae and their guests, showed up and shared their experiences since they graduated MSU. They as well as others who could not attend also responded to a survey about their educational and career experiences since grad-uation. Several have received graduate degrees in various fields including anthropology, public health, and museum management. All are doing interesting work ranging from public relations, law, teaching, and newspaper reporting. Others, as indicated below, described their current activities in various places.

Page 2 ANTHROPOLOGY NEWS

Alumnae from left to right Nancy Burke Toomey („77), Lucy Gambino („94), Rosa Diaz Mulryan (‟84), Catherine

Just Sciallo (99)

Married in 2008, he and his wife (Stephanie Morano, also Montclair, 2006- Industrial Design) have been serving as Peace Corps Volunteers on the island of Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean since 2010. Jon teaches computers at a primary school and runs an archaeology camp for local kids during the summer. Upon return in 2013, he plans to attend graduate school, focusing on Caribbean archaeology.

Jonathan Hanna (continued)

Katie McGhee (2008)

Katie is currently living on the Community Supported Garden at Genesis Farm in Blairstown, NJ (http://www.csgatgenesisfarm.com/), where she is working as an apprentice for six months, learning how to plant, grow and harvest produce for local consumption, and how a CSG functions. She is interested in the growing movement that is shifting our culture toward more locally-focused and sustainable ways of being, so this is her exploration into that. Perhaps it will turn into a career in sustainable agriculture, or environmental education. She writes that “It's a very beautiful place, and I bet that some classes or student groups would be interested in coming to visit and having a tour. Let me know! Right next door there is an incredible education center as well with very interesting programming and an extensive library of materials on all things sustainable.” (http://www.genesisfarm.org/).

Katie has also been working with Viviana Bernal (MSU class of '08), current Program Assistant in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at MSU) and several other women. They created a skills-building workshop for the 2012 Forum for the Associ-ation for Women's Rights in Development (AWID). This year's Forum theme was “Transforming Economic Power to Advance Women’s Rights and Justice.” In line with that theme, their workshop was entitled “Creating a Culture of Peace for Economic Transformation: Skills to Empower, Knowledge to Transcend.” It was intended to help facilitate a paradigm shift based on principles of a culture of peace, such as cooperation, mutuality, integration, flexibility, accompaniment, etc. They highlighted the particular strengths and insights of women who are already creating such a culture in different communities and around different issues, with a particular focus on economics and the incredible potential they believe such practices have to transform the way we exchange goods and services across all levels of society.

In the summer of 2011, Katie and Viviana visited Viviana’s family in El Salvador and met with peace activist, Marta Benavides. Benavides has created a movement called "Siglo XXIII Paz Sus-tentable" (the 23rd Century Movement)-- a process for transforming culture through the arts, creating a culture of peace, of being intentional in heart, mind, word and action to create the world we want, while always keeping the children of the 23rd century in mind. Marta Benavides has formed her ideas and processes from her years of ex-perience as a peace activist in El Salvador, and from her relationship with her mentor, Monsignor Oscar Romero--the Catholic Archbishop from El Salvador who became a martyr for peace in 1980. The AWID workshop Katie and Viviana created was inspired by the work of Marta Benavides and Monsignor Romero.

Katie also recently finished co-directing the musical Willy Wonka Jr. at Howell Middle School North in Farmingdale, NJ. “The kids” she writes “were wonderful, and it was a great experience.” She has also worked on a few other theatre projects, as an Artistic Intern with the American Place Theatre in NYC, and worked as a pro-duction assistant for the World Science Festival. She has also bartended!

Page 3 EDITED BY: SANA MIRZA

“It's a very

beautiful place,

and I bet that

some classes or

student groups

would be

interested in

coming to visit

and having a

tour. Let me

know!”

Halah Thomas (2010)

Engaged Anthropology

In addition to the two new courses being offered by Dr. Matthews (previous page), several other cours-es offered by the department are focusing on engaged anthropology.

This summer Dr. McCaffrey will take a class to Ithaca, NY as part of a service learning class, “Sustainability in Action.” Students will volunteer on an organic farm and visit Ecovillage at Ithaca, an inten-tional community that promotes a healthy, socially rich lifestyle, while minimizing ecological impacts. Students will learn about sustainability initiatives in Ithaca ranging from wind and solar power projects, sustainable food initiatives, and alternative banking. For more information, contact Dr. McCaffrey at mccaf-freyk@mail.montclair.edu.

Last Spring Dr Gerber’s Community and Health class was treated to unique guest lecturers. Jane Dunhamn of the National Black Disability Coalition agreed to speak to the class and brought an entire panel of esteemed speakers with her!!! Check them out at: http://www.blackdisability.org/ Jane, co-founder of NBDC and member of the US Commission on Civil Rights, was joined by James Harris, Chair of the N.J. NAACP, Sa-fiyyah A. Muhammad, a parent advocate, and Sue Gottesman, a lawyer and disability policy advisor. The panel was entitled, “Social Justice and Dominant Culture Values in Disability Policy.” Their presentation had a power-ful impact on at least one student, Lisa Williams who applied for (and won!) a Bigel Award in order to intern with them this past summer.

Students also had the opportunity to think about community health from the standpoint of sustainable agriculture and a local, healthy, food supply-chain. They visited the Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture and got to think about what makes something “natural,” and whether organic is always better, and the complica-tions and logistics of eating locally, among other things. They got to meet pigs and chickens , and see plants grow! And, they were escorted by the incredibly knowledgeable Nena Johnson (thanks again, Nena!), the Direc-tor of the Growing Farmers Initiative. She spent quite a long time talking about the politics of farming and how it is part of a youth resistance movement, as well as a practical career choice for some. She discussed how stu-dents can get involved via internships and apprenticeships, and about their new Young Farmers Program and why it is important nationally. To find out more, see http://www.stonebarnscenter.org/

And lastly…….the Community & Health class participated in the Center for Public Anthropology’s Com-munity Action Project http://www.publicanthropology.org/community-action-project/. The Community Action Pro-ject provides an interactive venue for both intellectual exchange and for activism. It uses the internet to draw thousands of students at over sixty universities together into an intellectual community, and has students consid-er ethical issues that lie at the interface of anthropology and the contemporary world. Thus, it empowers stu-dents by providing them with a sense of engagement, of how what they are learning relates to the broader world, and an opportunity to put that knowledge into practice and literally apply what they know to make a difference. Two students from our department wrote winning op-eds. Congratulations to Ellen Henry-O'Hara and Linda Anne Schuman!!

Page 4 ANTHROPOLOGY NEWS

Upon graduation Halah was selected as a 2010 New Jersey Housing and Community Development Scholars Intern. As a Community Development Scholar she interned for ten weeks at the Parkside Business and Community in Partnership, Inc in Camden, N.J. In 2012 she was invited to serve in the Peace Corps. She is currently in Indonesia going through the training process to become a Peace Corps volunteer. After training in-volving Bahasa Indonesian classes 4 days for 20 hours a week and a TEFL class once a week for 6 hours she will spend two years teaching English in an Indonesian school.

Page 5 EDITED BY: SANA MIRZA

Dr. Gerber with Bigel recipient Lisa Williams

Dr. Brook with Kelly Vaghenas, recipient of the Undergraduate Oral/Multimedia Presen-

tation Award

ANTHROPOLOGY NEWS Page 5

Congratulations! To all the graduates in 2012!

Lambda Alpha (National Anthropology Honor Society) Inductees Angelica Maria Abreu, Nicole Barile, Jaclyn Beck, Laura DiMattina, Christopher Hillyer, Jesse Mazzariello, Sean O'Connor, Robin Paoletti,,Noele Reany, Malgorzata Smerdel,

Bigel Recipients Melissa Belloff (research on use of seatbelts), Jessica Mulcahy (forensic study at Mercyhurst College), Sean O’ Connor (research on Japanese religion), Lisa Williams (internship with the National Black Disability Coalition).

Linda Anne Shuman and Ellen Henry-O‟ Hara were recognized for outstanding achievement for their essays for the Center for Public Anthropology’s Community Action Project.

Kelly Vaghenas was the recipient of the Undergraduate Oral/Multimedia Presentation Award at the 2012 Stu-dent Research Symposium for her presentation entitled, "Danthropology: A New, Interdisciplinary After-School Project in Structured Play." She also received a $500 scholarship from AFT, the union, called the Becker-Keenen-Moore-Uhia-Waller Scholarship.

Dr. Brash continues to promote his 2011 book, Bloomberg's New York: Class and Governance in the Luxury City, which was named the Best Overlooked New York City Book of 2011 by The Village Voice. He gave invited talks on the book at the University of Pennsyl-vania, the College of Mount Saint Vincent and the 2011 meetings of the American Anthropological Association. Dr. Brash also gave the Mar-quee Lecture of the Cultural Geography Specialty Group at the 2012 meetings of the American Association of Geographers. He has been interviewed about the book and related issues by journalists from The Nation, Salon, and a number of other media outlets. In the past year, Dr. Brash has published articles in Anthropology Now and the Journal of Cultural Geography, as well as two book chapters, one in Global Down-towns, an edited volume on central cities across the globe, and another in Beyond Zuccotti Park, a collection of essays on protest and public space. Currently, he is teaching a new seminar on the Occupy Wall Street movement, starting a research project on Manhattan's High Line Park, and serving as President of the Society for the Anthropology of North America.

Dr. Brook has been working with Bryan Murdock, the Director of MSU Service Learning and Civic Engagement Program (SLCE), to develop and submit a planning grant ($30,000) for funding to JP Morgan Chase. The grant, “Campus-Community Partnerships for Transforma-tional Change in the Oakwood Avenue School,” proposes a campus-community partnership between JP Morgan Chase, the Orange Public Schools and the SLCE program. The grant would support an underperforming school and a distressed neighborhood by linking the three part-ner institutions.

In the past year, Dr. Davidson has published a comparative essay on two ethnographies of precarious poverty and affliction in

the global North and South in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power (February 2012), and submitted an article on the gendered poli-

tics of aspiration among adolescent girls in Silicon Valley now under review by Gender, Place, and Culture. She has also published a book

review essay in the magazine AnthropologyNow (December 2011), and has reviews in press and forthcoming in anthropology journals and

anthropology newsletters. In addition, a 2011 article she published in Ethnography is being reprinted in an anthology entitled, Education and

the Risk Society: Theories, Discourse, and Risk Identities in Education Contexts (Sense Publishers,forthcoming in 2012). Recently, Dr. Da-

vidson gave invited presentations on her book, The Burdens of Aspiration: Youth, Schools, and Success in the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon

Valley (2011) in California, (University of California at Santa Cruz and Center for Community and Civic Engagement at DeAnza College in

Cupertino, California), and presented papers at the 2011 AAA meetings in Montreal (for which she also organized a panel), and at the Ameri-

can Association of Geographers meetings (New York City, February 2012). She is currently working on an article about racialization, academic

performance, and class politics in contemporary Silicon Valley.

Last summer, Dr. McCaffrey was selected to attend a National Science Foundation sponsored intensive class on research method-

ology and video analysis at Duke University. She continued her work as editor of Anthropology Now. This fall, her exhibition (curated the

photographer and video artist Bonnie Donohue, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) “Killing Mapepe: Sex and Death in Cold War

Vieques,” will open at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, with sponsorship of the American Anthropological Associa-

tion.

Dr. Rothstein presented papers at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal and at the

2012 American Ethnological Society (AES) meeting in New York City. She was also a discussant at a session on “Anthropologies of Unem-

ployment: Disciplinary Borders and Crossings in the Study of Unemployment” at the AES meeting. During the summer, she gave an invited

presentation at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City entitled "¿Por qué no soy antropóloga pos-moderna?: cuarenta años de trabajo

de campo y teoría en San Cosme Mazatecochco, Tlaxcala" (Why am I not a post-modernist anthropologist? Forty years of field work and

theory in San Cosme Mazatecochco, Tlaxcala). A book review on The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras by

Daniel. R. Reichman is in press for the Fall, 2012 issue of the Anthropology of Work Review.

During the Spring 2012 semester, Dr. Siegel was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and conduct research with the Caribbe-

an Research Group in the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, The Netherlands. He directed two graduate seminars in Caribbean/

lowland South American archaeology and collaborated with faculty and graduate students in research of mutual interest. Dr. Siegel traveled to

Vienna in July to deliver a paper at the International Congress of Americanists. In the fall, he will continue to collaborate with the Caribbean

Research Group to develop a paper on heritage consideration and current conceptions of identity in the Caribbean. Additionally, he will contin-

ue work on a book on island historical ecology. In November, he traveled to Cuzco, Peru to present a paper entitled “Confronting Caribbean

Heritage in an Archipelago of Diversity: Politics, Stakeholders, Natural Disasters, Tourism, and Development.”

Dr. Vedwan is analyzing the data on drinking water attitudes and practices in a Delhi neighborhood that he collected during the

summer of 2012. Also, he is supervising two doctoral students and assisting them in planning and carrying out their dissertation research. The

students are working on the following topics: a socio-economic model of mitigating environmental contamination (groundwater arsenic in India);

and, impact of environmental education and exposure on environmental awareness among school kids in Jersey City. He will be presenting a

paper he has co-authored with Sushant Kumar Singh, an MSU doctoral student, at the upcoming Society for Applied Anthropology annual

meeting on deriving a composite vulnerability index aimed at mitigating arsenic contamination in Bihar, India.

ANTRHROPOLOGY NEWS

Anthropology Department Dickson Hall Montclair State University Chair Dr. Frances Rothstein

Phone: 973-655-3317 http://chss.montclair.edu/anthropology

Faculty News

Page 6