Association for Feminist Anthropology

AFA Home

Zora Neale Hurston Travel Grant

Sylvia Forman Paper Prize

Women and Globalization

VOICES, the AFA Journal

Book Reviews

Links and Resources

AFA Bylaws

AFA History and Goals

Order AFA publications

Subscribe to the AFA listserv

Join the AFA!

Some Past Officers

As former Chair Meg Conkey said, quoting the Eagles, "You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." Our former officers remain involved in the AFA in many ways, for which we are very grateful.

Florence E. Babb
Former President
Center for Women's Studies & Gender Research
University of Florida
3324 Turlington Hall
PO Box 117352
Gainesville, FL 32611
fbabb@wst.ufl.edu
Florence E. Babb is the Vada Allen Yeomans Professor of Women’s Studies at the University of Florida, where she is also Affiliate Professor of Anthropology (2005-present). She received her PhD in 1981 from the University of New York at Buffalo. After teaching three years at Colgate University, she held a joint appointment in Anthropology and Women’s Studies at the University of Iowa (1982-2004) where she served terms as chair of the two departments as well as of programs in international studies. She is the author of Between Field and Cooking Pot: The Political Economy of Marketwomen in Peru (1989, second edition 1998) and After Revolution: Mapping Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal Nicaragua (2001), both with University of Texas Press. Her articles have appeared in many journals, including American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Ethnology, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Latin American Research Review, and GLQ. She has edited special issues of Latin American Perspectives and Critique of Anthropology. Her current book project, Touring Revolution, Fashioning Nations, focuses on the cultural and gendered impact of tourism in post-conflict areas, including Nicaragua, Cuba, Peru, and Mexico. She has served on the Committee on Minority Issues in Anthropology and on several AAA boards. She is also active in the Latin American Studies Association.

Amy Harper
Former Executive Board Member

Deborah Crooks
Former Executive Board Member

Gayatri Reddy
Former Program Chair

Mary Roaf
Former Student Representative
Temple Anthropology Department
PO Box 31915
Philadelphia, PA 19104
mroaf@temple.edu

Megan Sinnott
Former Anthropology Newsletter Column Co-Editor
Women’s Studies Institute
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3969
Atlanta, GA 30302-3969
megansinnott@yahoo.com

Mary Weismantel
Former Program Chair
Department of Anthropology
Northwestern University
1810 Hinman Avenue, Room 54
Evanston, IL 60208-1330
mjweis@northwestern.edu
Mary Weismantel is Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She is the author of two books, Cholas and Pishtacos: Tales of Race and Sex in the Andes (Chicago, 2001), and Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (Pennsylvania, 1988). In the last few years, her research interests have shifted towards Pre-Columbian art, as seen in her article on Moche sex pots in the American Anthropologist.

Kathleen Sterling
Past AFA Listserv Coordinator
Dept. Of Anthropology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
sterling@berkeley.edu Kathleen Sterling is a recent graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on the archaeology of Upper Paleolithic Western Europe. Her areas of study include visual imagery, lithic technology, learning and social identity, and the sociopolitics of archaeology. She is interested in third-wave feminist philosophy and approaching both archaeological data and archaeological practice from an explicitly womanist perspective.

Mary K. Anglin
Chair (03-05)
Dept. of Anthropology
211 Lafferty Hall
University of Kentucky
Lexington, KY 40506-0024
manglin@uky.edu

Laury Oaks
Former Executive Board Member
Associate Professor
Women's Studies Program
4701 South Hall
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
oaks@womst.ucsb.edu

Laury Oaks is an Associate Professor of Women's Studies with affiliated status in the Departments of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She holds a B.A. (University of Illinois, 1990) and M.A. (Johns Hopkins University, 1992) in Anthropology and a joint Ph.D. in Anthropology and Public Health (Johns Hopkins University, 1998). Oaks is author of Smoking and Pregnancy: The Politics of Fetal Protection (Rutgers University Press, 2001) and co-editor with Barbara Herr Harthorn of Risk, Culture, and Health Inequality: Shifting Perceptions of Danger and Blame (Greenwood Press, in press). Her publications on the social and cultural dynamics around reproductive politics in the U.S., Ireland, and Japan appear in Reproducing Reproduction (Sarah Franklin and Helena Ragone, eds.), Fetal Subjects, Feminist Positions (Lynn M. Morgan and Meredith W. Michaels, eds.), Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Irish Journal of Feminist Studies, Women's Studies International Forum, and Social Science and Medicine (Gwynne Jenkins and Marcia Inhorn (eds), special issue "Reproduction Gone Awry," in press).

Debra Martin
Former Executive Board Member
Hampshire College
School of Natural Science
Cole Science Center
Amherst, MA 01002-5001 Dmartin@hampshire.edu Debra L. Martin (PhD, University of Massachusetts/Amherst, 1983) has been the Dean of the School of Natural Science at Hampshire College since 2000, as well as holding a position there as Professor of Biological Anthropology since 1996. She is also currently the Director of the US Southwest and Mexico Program. Martin has also been Dean of Advising and Acting Dean of Students (1995-1996); Adjunct Professor Anthropology Graduate Faculty (1990-present) at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. Her research interests include women's health in antiquity, reproductive biology, and adaptation to desert environments (reflected in field work in American Southwest, Northern Mexico, Egypt, and United Arab Emirates). Significant publications include Troubled Times: Violence and Warfare in the Past (with David Frayer), Gordon and Breach 1997; "Women's Bodies, Women's Lives: Biology and Gender in the Ancient Southwest" in Gender and Hierarchy, School of American Research Press, 2001; Harmony and Discord: Bioarchaeology of the La Plata Valley (with co-authors), Museum of New Mexico Press, 2001.

A. Lynn Bolles
Past Chair
Women's Studies
2101 Woods Hall
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20742
A_Lynn_Bolles@umail.umd.edu

A. Lynn Bolles is Professor of Women’s Studies and Affiliate Faculty member in Anthropology, and Comparative Literature Departments and Afro-American Studies Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. From 1980-89, she directed Africana Studies at Bowdoin College. Bolles has a A.B. (Syracuse, 1971), M.A. (Rutgers, 1978) and Ph.D. (Rutgers, 1981) and is author of Sister Jamaica: A Study of Women, Work and Households in Kingston (1996), We Paid Our Dues: Women Trade Union Leaders in the Caribbean (1996), and co-author of In the Shadows of the Sun (1990). Her work has also appeared in Caribbean Studies, Review of Radical Economics, Transforming Anthropology, American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, New West Indian Guide, and over 25 book chapters. Her current research is on women tourist workers in Jamaica, collecting life histories of pioneer Black women anthropologists, and immigration networks in the Metro DC area. Active in her profession, Bolles was elected to a number of prominent positions including: President (1983) and Treasurer (1989-91) of the Association of Black Anthropologists; Councilor of the American Ethnological Society (1992-96), Executive Council member (1992-95), and President of the Caribbean Studies Association (1997-98) and currently, chair-elect of the Association for Feminist Anthropology. She serves on the editorial board of Urban Anthropology and was an editor of Feminist Studies (1988-96).

Sandra Morgen
Past Chair
CSWS 340 Hendricks Hall
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403
smorgen@oregon.uoregon.edu

Kelli Ann Costa
Former Anthropology Newsletter Contributing Editor
Crestview 334
Franklin Pierce College
Rindge, NH 03461
KACosta@worldnet.att.net

Shagufta Bidiwala
Former Student Board Member
235 A Marion Ave.
Ben Lomond, CA 95005
(O) 831-461-8008, ext 27
shagufta@cruzio.com

Margaret W. Conkey
Past Chair, 1998-2000
Dept. Of Anthropology
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
conkey@sscl.berkeley.edu
http://yana.sscl.berkeley.edu/arf/main/conkey.html

Meg Conkey is the Class of 1960 Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Archaeological Research Facility at the University of California, Berkeley. Her publications include "Archaeology and the Study of Gender" (1984) with Janet Spector; "Original Narratives: The Political Economy of Gender in Archaeology" (1991), with Sarah Williams; Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory (1991), co-edited with Joan Gero (Blackwell Publishers); "Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the Contours of Feminist Archaeology" (1995), and "Cultivating Thinking/Challenging Authority: Some Experiments in Feminist Pedagogy in Archaeology" (1996), both with Ruth E. Tringham; and "From Programme to Practice: Archaeology and Gender" (1997), with Joan Gero. She has served on the Board of the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association, on the AAA's Long-Range Planning Committee, and held two separate terms on the Committee for the Status of Women (COSWA). As well, she has served on the Executive Board of the Society for American Archaeology, and on the SAA's COSWA. She is Treasurer of the Bay Area Group of the Society of Woman Geographers. At UC-Berkeley, she has long been an Affiliated Faculty in Women's Studies, and is on the Advisory Committee for the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality. In addition to her research and teaching interests in gender and feminist archaeology, she is a student of prehistoric, especially Paleolithic visual culture, and is carrying out a long-term field research project investigating the cultural landscapes of the late Paleolithic period in the French Midi-Pyrenees.

Christine G. T. Ho
Past Secretary, 1998-2000
Dept. of Anthropology
SOC 107
University of South Florida
Tampa, FL 33620-8100
ho@luna.cas.usf.edu
http://www.cas.usf.edu/anthropology/ho.html

Christine Ho is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. She received her Ph.D from UCLA in 1985. Her areas of study include Caribbean Society and Culture, Caribbean Migration, Globalization and Transnationalism, Caribbean Literature, Political Economy of Race and Ethnicity, Social Construction of Gender, Kinship and Social Organization, Trinidad and Tobago, and Peoples of Color in the United States. Selected Publications include Salt Water Trinnies: Afro-Trinidadian Immigrant Networks and Non-Assimilation in Los Angeles. New York: A M S Press, 1991; "The Internationalization of Kinship and the Feminization of Caribbean Migration." Human Organization Spring 1993; "The Twin Processes of Racialization and Ethnification among Afro-Trinidadian Immigrants in Los Angeles." Caribbean Quarterly, 1994; "Chinese in the English-Speaking Caribbean." In, James Dow (ed.) Encyclopedia of World Cultures Vol. VIII. pp. 55-59. 1995; "Differential Mobility: Comparing Cultural Contexts and Subjective Experiences of Afro-Caribbean and Euro-American Women." International Journal of Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies. 1996; "Caribbean Transnationalism as a Gendered Process." Latin American Perspectives. In Press.

Joan Gero
Former Program Chair, 1998-1999
Dept. Of Anthropology
American University
Washington, DC 20016
jgero@american.edu

Joan Gero was delighted to serve as AFA co-program chair (with Bill Leap), coordinating the AFA-sponsored sessions for the 1998 and 1999 AAA annual meetings in Philadelphia and then in Chicago. Gero is a newly-appointed professor at American University in Washington, D. C., following 14 years of teaching at the University of South Carolina. Before South Carolina, while a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts, she was already bringing feminist concerns to archaeology, wondering (out loud!) why women received fewer grants and less money to conduct archaeological investigations than our male counterparts. From there, she began to undertake her own excavations, with the explicit goal of exploring gender in prehistory. She has stayed with this for most of her professional years, working in the Peruvian Andes and more recently in northwest Argentina, studying prehistoric women's public roles in processes of political consolidation as well as their less visible roles in formative households. She has looked at gender through prehistoric iconography as well as with distributions of plant remains. She is particularly interested in developing ideas of a feminist practice of archaeology and hopes to be working in theis direction in the near future.

William Leap
Former Program Chair, 1998-1999
Dept. Of Anthropology
American University
Washington, DC 20016
wlm@american.edu

Shellie Ellis
Former Newsletter Editor, 1998-2000
Dept. of Public Health Sciences
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center
PHS Hawthorne, Medical Center Blvd.
Winston-Salem, NC 27157
sellis@rc.phs.wfubmc.edu

Shellie Ellis, M.A. was a Contributing Editor to the Anthropology Newsletter. Ms. Ellis is a Research Associate in the Department of Public Health Sciences, Section on Social Sciences and Health Policy at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. She is the Assistant Director of the Women's Health Center of Excellence of the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, a nationally designated program of the U.S. Public Health Service. Ms. Ellis holds a bachelor's degree in Journalism from the University of Oklahoma and a Master's degree in Anthropology from Wake Forest University. Before pursuing studies in Medical Anthropology, she worked in print journalism and public relations for public television in Oklahoma, and has studied abroad in both France and Israel. In 1998, Ms. Ellis was elected to a four-year term on the Board of Directors of the National Women's Health Network, an independent, member-supported organization dedicated to safeguarding women's health rights and interests by providing accurate, unbiased health information to women and advocating for national health policies that address women's health needs. In 1998, she was awarded a scholarship to attend the Women's Leadership Program at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro, NC.

France Winddance Twine
Former Voices Co-Editor, 1999-2001
University of North Carolina
University Center for International Studies
223 East Franklin St., CB#5145
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-5145
taisha@uswest.net

France Winddance Twine was an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University Center for International Studies at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill during the 1999-2000 academic year and an Associate Editor of SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Twine teaches courses on critical race feminism, racism and anti-racism, feminism & nationalism, popular feminism and motherhood. She is the author of Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (Rutgers, 1997) and the co-editor of three volumes. She co-edited "Feminisms and Youth Cultures", a special issue of SIGNS (Spring, 1998), Ideologies & Technologies of Motherhood (Routledge, 1999), and Racing Research/ Researching Race (New York University Press, forthcoming). She is currently writing a feminist ethnography based upon field research in the U.K. that explores the meaning of race and racism for the white birth mothers of African descent children in Britain and co-editing a book with Kathleen Blee entitled Feminism & Anti-racism: International Struggles.

Ann Kingsolver
Former Executive Board Member
Dept. of Anthropology
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
kingsolver@sc.edu

Carol Mukhopadhyay
Former Executive Board Member
Dept. of Anthropology
San Jose State University
One Washington Square
San Jose, CA 95192-0113
mukh@email.sjsu.edu

Carol Mukhopadhyay (PhD UC Riverside, 1980) is Professor of Anthropology at San Jose State University. Dr. Mukhopadhyay offers courses in gender and culture, human sexuality, and methodology. Her research interests include sexual division of labor (in households, occupations and science and technology); folk theories of gender; and multicultural education.

Barbara A. West
Former Treasurer
Dept. Of Sociology/Anthropology
University of the Pacific
Stockton, CA 95211
209-946-3181
bwest@uop.edu

Barbara West is an associate professor of anthropology and international studies at the University of the Pacific. She works on issues of gender, national identity, women's lives, and food in postsocialist Hungary. Her most important publication coming out of that work is The Danger is Everywhere! The Insecurity of Transition in Postsocialist Hungary, Waveland Press 2002. In 2002-03 she started a new field project with Hungarian immigrants to Melbourne, Australia. She continues to explore gender, women's lives, and food with this population.

Laurie Occhipinti
Former Membership Coordinator
Dept. of Sociology/Anthropology
Northeastern University
Boston, MA 02115
l.occhipinti@nunet.neu.edu

Laurie Occhipinti has been doing anthropological research in northwestern Argentina since 1996. Her dissertation research examined the role of Catholic NGOs in economic development in indigenous communities. Her current interests focus on understanding the ways in which the Wichi communities of the Argentine Chaco conceptualize development, and to work with the communities and organizations in the region to formulate strategies for land use, economic sustainability, and indigenous rights in the region. Dr. Occhipinti is currently a Lecturer at Northeastern University in Boston. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology in 2000, and her M.A. in 1995, from McGill University in Montreal. She received her B.A summa cum laude in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1990.

Carole M Counihan
Former Executive Board Member
Sociology/Anthropology Department
Millersville University
PO Box 1002
Millersville, PA 17551-0302
(717) 872-3575
carole.counihan@millersville.edu

Carole M. Counihan is Professor of Anthropology and former director of Women's Studies at Millersville University, one of fourteen universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education. She received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1981 and a BA from Stanford University in 1970. Counihan's research interests center on food, culture, gender, and ethnic identity. She has done fieldwork in the United States and Italy and is finishing a book on food, gender and family in Florence. She is also conducting a long-term fieldwork project collecting food-centered life histories in a Latina/o community in the San Luis Valley of Colorado with her husband, anthropologist James Taggart. Counihan is the author of The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power (New York: Routledge, 1999) and co-editor of Food and Gender: Identity and Power (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1998) and of Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997). She is editor of Food in the USA: A Reader (Routledge 2002). She has published articles and book reviews on food and culture in the Women's Review of Books, NWSA Journal, and the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women's Studies. She is co-editor of the scholarly journal Food and Foodways.

Ramona Lee Perez Former Executive Board Member
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology
New York University
100 Rufus D. Smith Hall
25 Waverly Place
New York, NY 10003-6790
rlp213@nyu.edu

Ramona Lee Perez, a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at New York University, is completing fieldwork on food, gender and social networks in southern New Mexico and northern Chihuahua. She holds a B.A. (University of California San Diego, 1996) and M.A. (New York University, 2001) in Anthropology. Perez is a Ford Foundation Fellow and a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (Scribner�s, 2003). Her interests include the anthropology of food, Mexico/US Borderlands, media, ethnicity and gender, and critical pedagogy.

Margaret Vazquez-Geffroy
Former Executive Board Member
Department of Behavioral Science/Anthropology
New Mexico Highlands University
Las Vegas, New Mexico 87701
mvazquezg@nmhu.edu

Margaret Vazquez-Geffroy received her PhD from the University of New Mexico in 1977. Her research interests include women in society and culture in the Hispanic and Native American Southwest and biocultural dimensions of breastfeeding at the perinatal period. Her publications include "An event recorder for infant feeding research" in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine (1995, with B. Taylor and P. Lujan) and "Continuously Recorded Suckling Behaviour and Its Effect on Lactational Amenorrhoea" in Journal of Biosocial Research, (Cambridge) (July 1999, with B. Taylor et al.). She is also active in the San Miguel Maternal Child Health Council and the AAUW.

Rosemary Joyce
Program Co-Chair (04-05)
Executive Board Member (04-06)
Department of Anthropology
University of California-Berkeley
232 Kroeber Hall
Berkeley, CA 94720-3710
rajoyce@uclink.berkeley.edu

Rosemary A. Joyce, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, has engaged in archaeological fieldwork in Honduras since 1977. She received the PhD in anthropology from the University of Illinois-Urbana in 1985. Her research interests include ceramic analysis, household archaeology, and sex, gender and the body, interests unified under the heading of social archaeology, not coincidentally the title of a new journal of which she is a founding editor. Her archaeological fieldwork employs ceramic analysis, household archaeology, and settlement pattern studies to understand how material culture shapes identity, especially ethnicity, sex/gender, and age. She is also engaged with cultural heritage issues, an interest that stems from her experiences as Assistant Director of the Peabody Museum, Harvard University (1986-1989) and Director of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley (1994-1999). Her publications include Embodied Lives: Figuring Ancient Egypt and the Classic Maya (with Lynn Meskell, Routledge, 2003), The Languages of Archaeology: Dialogue, Narrative, and Writing (Blackwell, 2002), and Gender and Power in Prehispanic Mesoamerica (University of Texas 2001).

Jessica Cattelino
Student Representative
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
1126 E. 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
773-702-7708
jesscatt@uchicago.edu

Jessica Cattelino received her Ph.D. from NYU in May, and has just started as Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. She conducts research on indigenous sovereignty and citizenship, American public culture, and economy and value. She is completing a book based on research with Florida Seminoles about tribal casinos, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming, Sovereignty, and the Social Meanings of Casino Wealth. She also sustains interests in gender, space and place, law, and cultural production. As she completes her term as the student representative (and her time as a student) Jessica is especially anxious to encourage more graduate students to join AFA, and she is eager to think about ways to assist AFA members in staying abreast of feminist scholarship beyond anthropology.

Nandini Gunewardena
Executive Board Member (03-05)
Center for African American Studies 2308 Murphy Hall UCLA Box 951545 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1545 310-206-1317
nandini@ucla.edu

Nandini Gunewardena is an Applied Anthropologist who has expertise on poverty and gender issues, nutrition and health initiatives, and women's activism at the local and global front, based on her work internationally for over ten years in research, project implementation, and policy formulation on these issues. She returned to academia in 1998, first teaching courses on women and international development at UCLA, and later applied anthropology and women's studies courses at Pomona College. Currently, she is the Associate Director at the Center for African American Studies at UCLA where she coordinates among other activities, a major national conference on reparations (planned for May 2001), and a summer humanities research institute for students from historically Black Colleges and Universities. She draws upon women-of-color, feminist and postcolonial theorizing, combining qualitative and quantitative methods to trace interrelationships between ideological constructs and material conditions. Her current research focuses on suicide causality in Sri Lanka.

Back to current Officers page

Website maintained by Suzanne Baker