CV

Dr. Jonah Steinberg

Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology and Director, Global Studies, University of Vermont

509 Williams Hall

72 University Place

Burlington, Vermont 05405

jonah.steinberg@uvm.edu

 

Education

 

University of Pennsylvania, Department of Anthropology. PhD in Anthropology, August 2006. Dissertation title: “The Anatomy of the Transnation: The Globalization of the Isma’ili Muslim Community.”

 

Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA. Bachelor of Arts, June 1997. Major in Sociology and Anthropology.

 

Academic and Curatorial Positions

 

University of Vermont. Associate Professor (Fall 2006-present; promotion with tenure Spring 2014), Department of Anthropology and Global Studies Program. Further affiliation in Asian Studies. Courses include People, Poison, Place; Imaginative Ethnography; Street Children (offered at advanced, intermediate, and introductory levels); Human Migration; Social Crisis; Introduction to Global Studies; Introduction to Cultural Anthropology; Peoples of South Asia; Writing and Anthropology; Cities (an Advanced Readings seminar in Global Studies); a course on Romani people; and a seminar on religious revivalism across cultures.

 

Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Mediterranée. Commissioning Director/Curator, exhibition on Roma of my conception. Proposed project in 2015, invited summer 2016 to help plan and direct a major global exhbition with and on Roma people, including material culture, representations, and daily lives. Presented to and gained approval from the board of the museum under Chief Curator Jean-François Chougnet, January 2018. Exhibition opens May 9, 2023.

 

University of Vermont. Director, Global Studies (initially Acting Director 2015-2016). Fall 2016-Present. Initial term of five years. Interim Director, Global and Regional Studies Umbrella Program, Spring 2017.

 

University of California at Santa Cruz, College Nine and Porter College. Faculty Lecturer for core courses (two in Fall 2002, Fall 2004, Fall 2005). Externally-hired teaching assistant, Anthropology (five courses); Politics (three courses); Legal Studies (three courses); Community Studies (three courses); Literature; and History.

 

University of Pennsylvania, Department of Anthropology. Dean’s Teaching Award-Winning Teaching Assistant, 2001-2002.

 

Major External Grants

 

Awarded:

 

National Science Foundation, Cultural Anthropology Program, Intersections of Social and Geographic Marginality in Contemporary Urban Spaces. PI. Peer-reviewed. Grant no. 1660323. $299,710. Three years, 2017-2020. Extended through a fifth year, to summer 2022, due to Covid.  

 

As co-applicant with PI Pablo Bose: Vermont Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCOR/SOCKS). Social media sentiment and forced migration narratives. Awarded: $5000 for first-stage development. Second stage funding pending.  

 

Fulbright Scholar Program (IIE): Fulbright-IMéRA Chair in Migration Studies, for European Borders, Romani Migration, and Pandemic Panics. September 15, 2020. Awarded. Declined due to Covid-19 circumstances.

 

National Science Foundation, Cultural Anthropology Program. The Rite of Running Away: Street Children’s Experiences in North India. PI. Peer-reviewed. Grant no. 0924506, $233,654. Three years, 2009-2012.

 

National Science Foundation, supplement of $9,954 to The Rite of Running Away awarded 2012 for a fourth year. Peer reviewed, separate application.

 

Pending or Under Revision (Including Contests):

 

National Science Foundation, Documenting Endangered Languages Program: “Endangered Indic Languages of Europe: Community-Based Documentation of Lesser-Studied Sinte and Romani Varieties of the Mediterranean Rim.” Submitted October 14, 2022. $448,000. With Emily Manetta. Not funded but Program Officer strongly recommended resubmission. Currently revising for resubmission.

 

John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, “The Land of Lost Memory: A Journey Through the Holocaust’s Forgotten Camps, and the People Who Live There Now.” Submitted 9/16/22. Pending.

 

National Endowment for the Humanities, Media Projects Development Grants. “Streetsong: A Documentary.” $74,000. Submitted August 2022. Single-PI: but I invited Middlebury Professor and award-winning filmmaker Ioana Uricaru as director, Romani music maestro and poet Santino Spinelli as Creative Producer, and cinematographer and UVM alumnus Tyler Wilkinson-Ray as Director of Photography. Pending.

 

In Development:

 

For NSF Senior Archaeology Awards, “The Early Romani Archaeologies Project: Towards Engaged Excavation on Europe’s Margins.” With Scott Van Keuren.

 

For the Wenner-Gren Foundation, “The Early Romani Archaeologies Project: Towards Engaged Excavation on Europe’s Margins.” With Scott Van Keuren

 

NSF Mid-Career Award Competition. “Hypermarginality: Aerial Ethnography and the Intimate Remote.” In conjunction with Karen Seto, Yale University Geospatial Sciences. For February 2023. Substantially complete.

 

For the Templeton Foundation: “Worldly Possessions: Exorcism, Historical Crisis, and Matrices of Creativity in Mediterranean Europe.” With Brian Gilley, Indiana University Department of Anthropology.

 

Internal and Other Funding

 

Awarded:

 

Seed Grant, University of Vermont College of Arts & Sciences, for “The Early Romani Archaeologies Project: Towards Engaged Excavation on Europe’s Margins.” $10,000. With Scott Van Keuren. Award and Application both in 2022.

 

Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, Kinsler Grant: two separate awards of $7000 each ($14,000 total) for The Land of Lost Memory: The Holocaust’s Forgotten Camps, and the People Who Live There Now.

 

UVM Humanities Center Coor Programming Development Grant, $2500 for a visit by filmmaker and actor Alina Serban.

 

UVM School of the Arts Mollie Ruprecht Fund, $1000 for a visit by filmmaker and actor Alina Serban.

 

Ader-Konigsberg Curriculum Development Fellowships for the Program in Holocaust Studies, The Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, $7,000 for the development of a course on “The Romani Holocaust.” Awarded March 2021.

 

Ader-Konigsberg Curriculum Development Fellowships for the Program in Holocaust Studies, The Carolyn and Leonard Miller Center for Holocaust Studies, $7,000 for the development of a course on “The Romani Holocaust.” Awarded March 2021.

 

Humanities Center Lattie Coor Funds, $2,500 for “Pulp Culture Comic Arts Festival,” October 2017.

 

Humanities Center Research Funds, University of Vermont. “Selective Visibility, Practiced Mobility:

Roma, Refugees, and ISIS in a Changing Europe.” $7,000. Summer 2016.

 

Holocaust Center Research Funds, University of Vermont. $3,000. For archival and oral history work on Roma in Europe, Summer 2016.

 

Peter Seybolt Memorial Award, Asian Studies, University of Vermont. For research in India, summer 2015.

 

REACH Program, University of Vermont. Highly competitive. Awarded for next phase of “The Disappearing Gypsy.” $33,662. PI. Peer-reviewed. Rejection rate: 85%. Overall funds available for all applicants, $300,000, of which this award is more than 10%. Peer reviewed.

 

Joan Smith Faculty Research Award, University of Vermont, Fall 2011 for Summer 2012, awarded for projects which show exceptional potential for a public contribution. For project on Roma in European Union, “The Disappearing Gypsy: Spatialized Modernities, Pollutive Bodies, and Urban Cleansing in the European Union,” $6800. PI. Rejection rate 86-89%. Peer-reviewed.

 

Publications

 

Single-Authored Peer Reviewed Books:

 

A Garland of Bones: Child Runaways and Postcolonial India. New Haven: Yale University Press. January 2019.

 

Isma’ili Modern: Globalization and Identity in a Muslim Community. Series on Islamic Civilization and Muslim Networks (Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence, series editors). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Peer-reviewed. Winner of the inaugural Citizenship Book Award (for best book on citizenship in 2011-2012).  Center for the Study of Citizenship (award committee chaired by Dr. Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor at University of Pennsylvania).

 

Published Peer-Reviewed Articles or Chapters:

 

“Land of the Ungoverned: On the Historiography of Lawlessness at the Frontiers of Empire.” In Muslim Communities and Cultures of the Himalayas: Conceptualizing the Global Ummah. Jacqueline Fewkes and Megan Sijapati, eds. New York: Routledge Press, 2020.

 

“Shadowspace: On the Ethnographic Genesis of a Concept.” In Etnografia e Netnografia. Riflessioni teoriche, sfide metodologiche e esperienze di ricerca, Giuseppe Masullo, ed. Napoli: Loffredo, 2020.

 

“The Social Life of Death on Delhi’s Streets: Unclaimed Souls, Pollutive Bodies, Dead Kin and the Kinless Dead.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 80(2) (publication date with Taylor and Francis is October 2013)

 

“Writing Transnationality: Locating Citizenship in Fluid Cartographies.” Peer-reviewed chapter. The Meaning of Citizenship, Richard Marback and Marc Kruman, eds. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015.

 

“Remaining Nameless: How Child Runaways Hide.” South Asia Multidisciplinary Journal 12, 2015.

 

Exhibition Catalogue(s):

 

Françoise Dallemagne, Julia Ferloni, Alina Maggiore, Jonah Steinberg, and Anna Mirga, (eds.) Barvalo: Roms, Sinti, Manouches, Voyageurs. Paris: Anamosa Editions, 2023 (in press). Exhibition catalogue with wide distribution. Editorial review.

 

Steinberg, Jonah (lead author), et al. (with Curatorial Team). “Nothing About Us Without Us – Khanć Amendar bi Amengo. Travailler ensemble autour de l’éxposition « Barvalo ».” In Barvalo: Roms, Sinti, Manouches, Voyageurs. Eds. Jonah Steinberg, Anna Mirga, Julia Ferloni, et al. Paris: Anamosa Editions, 2023 (in press).

 

Le renversement du miroir. Réflexion critique sur la pratique ethnographique et la muséologie Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka, with Jonah Steinberg and Julia Ferloni (I wrote a major part of this). Listed as co-author. In Barvalo: Roms, Sinti, Manouches, Voyageurs. Eds. Jonah Steinberg, Anna Mirga, Julia Ferloni, et al. Paris: Anamosa Editions, 2023 (in press).

 

Les enjeux éthiques de la constitution d’un patrimoine romani dans les collections françaises Julia Ferloni, with Jonah Steinberg and Anna Mirga-Kruszelnicka. Listed as co-author. In Barvalo: Roms, Sinti, Manouches, Voyageurs. Eds. Jonah Steinberg, Anna Mirga, Julia Ferloni, et al. Paris: Anamosa Editions, 2023 (in press).

 

Literary Works

 

Pandaclia: A Novel, and Kimo: A Novel are both currently being read by an editor or agent.

 

Three other novels, The Unquiet Earth,  are all partially complete and actively in progress.

 

Ashram: A Novel, a finalist for the 2014 novel-in-progress shortlist and a finalist for the 2015 completed novel competitions (each with separate committees of judges) of the Faulkner-Wisdom/Pirate’s Alley Writing Competition, was completed Spring 2015. It is not yet published but will circulate.

 

Other Works Published or in Development:

 

Steinberg, Jonah. “An Ending: India’s Railway Children.” Published post at Yale University Press’s blog. April 16, 2019.

http://blog.yalebooks.com/2019/04/16/an-ending-indias-railway-children/

 

Book Review for The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean by Engseng Ho. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. American Anthropologist, December 2007.

 

Book Review for Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan: Magic Medicine Symbols in Silk, Stone, Wood and Flesh. By Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, and Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov. London: Bennett and Bloom, 2006. American Anthropologist, March 2008.

 

Works in Progress:

 

The Land of Lost Memory: A Journey Through the Holocaust’s Forgotten Camps, and the People Who Live There Now. An editor at Cambridge University Press is currently considering my prospectus. Around 40,000 words complete. Expected completion early 2024.

 

“Marx and the Missing ‘Gypsy’: Europe and the European People Without History,” for Cultural Anthropology. 40% Complete, expected summer 2023.

 

“Uneasy Homelands: Romani People, Civil Rights, and the Question of India,” for Contemporary Studies in Society and History. 60% Complete, expected mid-2023

 

Camp Secrets: An American Institution’s Untold Tales. Materials submitted to (favorable) top trade publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux Senior Editor Alex Star. Expected Submission .

 

“The Notional Gypsy: Criminality, Nomadics, and the Colonial Imagination.” In preparation for Contemporary Studies in Society and History. Near completion (around 85%). Expected

 

“In the Land of No Gypsies: Spatialized Modernity, Cultural Trespass, and Unwanted Subjects in the Marseille Imaginary.” To Ethnography.

 

“Spellbound: The Lure of the Pre-Islamic in Himalayan Ethnology.” In Preparation.

 

Selected Professional Papers

 

November 2021. “The Language Test: Digital Surveillance, Linguistic Exposés, and the Public Debunking of Beggars.” With Emily Manetta. ILIS Conference, University of Salerno.

 

September 2020. “The Lagoon: Race, Space, and Social Trust around Marseille's Étang-de-Berre.” Royal Anthropological Institute Annual Conference. A volume is planned.

 

February 2020. “Explusion Begets Expulsion: Precarity Spirals and the Predicament of Recognition in Marseille.” Workshop on “Informalism and Marginalization.” University of Salerno, Italy.

 

November 2019. “Shadowspace: A Concept’s Ethnographic Evolution.” ILIS Symposium on Ethnography, University of Salerno, Italy.

 

November 2018. “Complex Marginality: Roma, Muslims, and Fluid Deployments of Embodied Identity in Migrant Landscapes” (a new version), American Anthropological Association annual conference, November 2018, San Jose.

 

June 2017. “Complex Marginality: Roma, Muslims, and Fluid Deployments of Embodied Identity in Migrant Landscapes.” IMISCOE 2017, Erasmus University Rotterdam.

 

March 2017. “Shadowspace: On the Cartography of Exclusion.” University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Department of Anthropology.

 

March 2014. “Land of the Ungoverned: On the Historiography of Lawlessness.” At Himalayan Studies Conference 3, 2014, Yale University: Panel on “Himalayan Ummah.”

 

May 2012. Society for Cultural Anthropology, Providence, Rhode Island. “Of Labor and Ungrievable Death: Precarious Life and Solo Children on Delhi's Streets.” On panel “Deadly Geographies: Political Violence, Sovereign Power, and the Making of Selfhood and Territory in Comparative Perspectives.” Peer-reviewed.

 

April 2012. American Ethnological Society, New York City. “Stations of Death: Railway Children, the Predicament of Law, and the Right to Exist.” Panel “Epistemology and Practices of Dissent in ‘Crisis.’” Peer-reviewed.

 

November 2011. American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montréal, Québec. “Wrong Side of the Tracks: Solo Children, Material Modernities, and The Postcolonial Railway.” Peer-reviewed.

 

June 2011. “Runaway Train: Railway Children and Normative Spatialities in India.” Society for the History of Childhood and Youth,” Columbia University, New York. Peer-reviewed.

 

February 2008. “Localizing Modernity: The Dissemination of the Village Organization.” Presented at Social Science Research Council conference on “Inter-Asian Connections,” Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Peer-reviewed.

 

November 2006. “Divine Essence Inherited: Schism and Succession in a Muslim Community.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2006. Presented at AAA Invited Panel, “Inheritance Matters.” Peer-reviewed.

 

December 2005. “Getting the Word Out: Two Modes of Muslim Global Discursive Community Building.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2005, Washington, DC.  Peer-reviewed.

 

March 2005. “The Other Side: Tajik Discourses of the Afghan Border.” Association for Asian Studies Annual Meeting, Chicago. Peer-reviewed.

 

May 2001. “Shamans and Mullahs: the Contestation of Culture on Pakistan’s Borderlands.” Canadian Anthropological Society Annual Conference, Montreal. Paper presented at panel on local manifestations of globalization. Peer-reviewed.

 

Selected Invited Talks

 

February 2020. “The Edge: Precarity and Shadowspace on Society’s Margins.” University of Virginia Anthropology Department Speaker Series.

 

July 2018, “Métiers des Roms Migrants à Marseille,” all-day roundtable/seminar on Romani professions and lives at MuCEM’s I2MP, Marseille.

 

July 2018, “Métiers et Savoir-Faire Rom dans les Carpathes,” all-day roundtable/seminar on Romani professions and lives at MuCEM’s I2MP, Marseille.

 

May 2015. “Beggars in the Palace: Do the Islamic Poor have a Place in Conservation and the Culture Park?” Doris Duke Charitable Trust for Islamic Art and Architecture at Doris Duke’s Shangri-La, Honolulu Museum of Art, Honolulu Hawai’i, May 16, 2105. Part of the prestigious Saturday Salon Series convened by DDCFIA and the Honolulu Museum of Art.

 

March 2015. “Stain: Undesirable Subjects and the Spectacle City.” University of Hawai’i (Mānoa) Department of Anthropology and University of Hawai’i Program in South Asian Studies. March 19, 2015.

 

April 2014. “A Thousand Ghost Maps: Health Crises in and as History.” Organized and directed multi-speaker symposium at University of Vermont Medical School.

 

October 2014. “Remaining Nameless:  How Street Children Hide.” Invited paper (by Veena Das and Jacob Copeman) for panel Names and Naming Practices: Singularity, Identity, and Temporality,

Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI.

 

March 2013. “Writing Transnationality.” Book Award Acceptance Speech. Center for the Study of Citizenship annual conference, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.

 

February 2010. “Stained Streets/Modern Undesirables: Street Dwellers as Pollutive Subjects in Urban India.” UVM Global and Regional Studies series.

 

March 2007. “Genealogies of Globalization: Indian Ocean Social Geographies Past and Present.” Presented at research symposium to Faculty of Asian Studies, University of Vermont.

 

September 2003. “Ethnography and its Uses in Central Asia.” Aga Khan Humanities Project, Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

 

July 2003. “Ethnography and its Critique.” Institute for Isma’ili Studies, London. Invited speaker for Occasional Lecture Series.

 

November 2001. “Afghan Refugees in Pakistan.” University of California at Santa Cruz.  Invited speaker at symposium "The Current Crisis: Focus on South Asia.”

 

International Development, Applied Anthropology, and Other Work Experience

 

The Mountain Institute. 2004-2011. Senior Fellow. Previously Senior Program Manager, National Park projects and North America programs (mediation between indigenous communities and National Parks in conservation programs), and Consultant for cultural heritage programs in Central Asia.

 

One Planet Education Network. 2010-2011. Occasional Consulting Anthropologist. Collaborated with design teams, conservationists, and indigenous communities to develop indigenously-informed, grant-supported digital worlds based on National Parks and other public lands worldwide. Most recent work on a “Virtual Machu Picchu” funded by the US Department of Education, supported by senior scholars at Harvard, and tested in English in NYC, Florida, and Boston-area schools.

 

Christensen Fund (Palo Alto, CA) and Aga Khan Humanities Project (Dushanbe, Tajikistan), Joint Film Production. Consulting Anthropologist, 2003. Worked in Tajikistan as consultant to documentary director and coordinator for documentary film Sacred Traditions in Sacred Places.

 

Human Rights Watch, Washington DC. Research Assistant, Asia Watch office. (Summer 1999).

 

Aga Khan Rural Support Programme, Northern Pakistan.  Research Scholar (Summer, 2001) and Field Researcher (Summer, 1994, 1995, 1996). Received annual award, 1995, for research.

 

Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. Full-time researcher and grantwriter (1997-1998).

 

United Nations High Commission for Refugees, Moscow, Russian Federation. Researcher, 1996.

 

Save the Children, Pakistan. Full-time support on projects for Afghan refugees, summer 1993.

 

Selected Awards and Honors

 

Kroepsch-Maurice Teaching Award, University of Vermont, nominee (2017 and 2018).

 

Citizenship Book Award, inaugural winner (for best book on citizenship in 2011-2012, awarded 2013), Center for the Study of Citizenship (award committee chaired by Rogers Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Politics at the University of Pennsylvania).

 

Joan Smith Faculty Research Award, University of Vermont, Fall 2011, awarded for projects which show exceptional potential for a public contribution. See above.

 

National Science Foundation, Research Grantee, 2009-2013, 2017-2022. See above.

 

Penfield Scholarship in Diplomacy, International Affairs, and Belles Lettres, University of Pennsylvania (2004-2005). Selective, merit-based award for dissertation research and writing.

 

Penn Prize for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student, University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. One of ten recipients across the university (2001).

 

Holden Furber Prize for an Outstanding Paper in South Asian Studies, University of Pennsylvania South Asia Regional Studies Department. Awarded for “Conjuring Pakistan:  The Signs and Symbols of Nation on a Pakistani Borderland” (2001).

 

William Penn Scholarship, University of Pennsylvania (for 1999-2003). Full multi-year support for graduate study. Selective and awarded on basis of academic merit.

 

Fulbright Grant for Research in India, grant winner (1997-1998). Topic: Impacts of Social Change Among Gujjar Nomads of the Himalaya. Declined in order to pursue graduate study.

 

Dean’s Award, Swarthmore College (1997).

 

Service

 

College:

 

Department:

 

National or Global Service or Affiliations

 

Fieldwork and Other Research Experience             

 

Southwestern Europe. Summer 2012, Summer 2013, Fall 2014, Summer and Fall 2016, Summer 2017, Summer 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2021, Summer 2022, Winter 2023: funded research on segregation and constructions of race in the regulation of Roma in public space in the Marseille Agglomeration, with additional work in Vienna, London, Paris and Budapest.

 

India, Summer 2015. Work on tribal communities and street life, Delhi, and followup work on child runaways.

 

India, full Spring Semester, 2011. NSF-supported fieldwork on child runaways (“solo child migrants”) in North India.

 

London. Summer 2010, Spring 2011, Summer 2012. NSF-supported archival work at the India Office, British Library.

 

India. Summer 2007. Fieldwork on homeless and runaway street children in New Delhi in preparation for grant applications. Data collected for article on street life in India’s capital.

 

India. Fall 2005. Preliminary fieldwork on street life and urban social change.

 

France and Switzerland. Dissertation Research. Conducted fieldwork on European centers of global Isma’ili Muslim community, and their connections to Pakistan and Tajikistan (2004).

 

Tajikistan. Dissertation Research. Conducted fieldwork on transnationality and allegiance among Isma’ili Muslims in postwar Tajikistan (Fall 2003).

 

Northern Pakistan.  Department of Anthropology Field Funds, University of Pennsylvania.  Conducted research on ethnic minorities, internal migrants, and Afghan refugees (Summer, 2001).

 

Moscow, Russian Federation.  Independent Research. Studied Romani language and collected oral histories from Roma (Gypsy) families in Moscow’s train stations (Summer, 1997 with followup Summer 1998). I have also carried out ethnographic work on Roma in Turkey and the Southern United States.

 

Northern Pakistan.  J. Roland Pennock Fellowship for Public Affairs, Swarthmore College.  Research Fellow.  Conducted research in Pakistan’s Northern Areas on social conflict. Interviewed eyewitnesses, villagers, politicians, officials, and professors in the Urdu language to collect data for a thesis in Sociology and Anthropology (Summer, 1996) under advisor Bruce Grant. Earlier research carried out during summers of 1994 and 1995.

 

Languages

 

 Fluent and literate in

Proficient and literate in

Basic self-directed study undertaken in

Very basic functional rudiments of

Extensive advanced university-level work in French and Urdu, including in literature and poetry. Advanced independent university-level work in the full spectrum of Hindi dialects, Rajasthan to Bengal. Intensive study of Balkan and Danube Romani, with excellent command on daily language and grammatical forms.

 

Areas of Specialization

 

Thematic areas: the extreme social edge; marginality and toxicity; hiding and liminal space; emergent inequalities and segregations, urban cleansing, identity-based eviction, exclusion, and expulsion; pariah populations and public notions of vagabondage, vagrancy, and itinerancy; globalization and transnationality; international development; human responses to social crisis and rapid social change; migration; street children, runaways, orphans, and homeless migrants; the body in the context of political economy; ideologies of gender, sexuality, and deviance; historical mediations of self and emotion and the lived experience of history; the politics of bodies in public space; colonial archives and ethnographic subjects.

 

Geographic areas: South Asia (including Pakistan and India), Central Asia (including Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), and global diasporas of Indic origin (including European Roma).

 

Media Appearances

 

“The Mosquito as Historical Protagonist.” Burlington Free Press, April 30, 2014.

 

Featured interview, Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition, full session, April 25, 2014.

 

“Gypsies Take Curious Route to U.S.” Featured in many national newspapers via Associated Press; accompanied AP reporter Wilson Ring to Quebec border and into Quebec for story, 2012.

 

“UVM Professor Looks Beyond ‘Slumdog’” in Burlington Free Press, September 7, 2009.

 

“Burlington-New Delhi, Face-to-Face” in Burlington Free Press, April 13, 2007.

 

Social Justice Activity and Community Involvement

 

Major outreach activities in 2023 associated with MuCEM museum exhibition focused on curricular development and pedagogy around civil rights, including in-person interventions at

 

Work with Sourire à la Vie NGO and residence for children with cancer, Marseille, France. 2023

 

Participant in Campaign to Support UNESCO Intangible Heritage Candidacy for Romani Music, Spring 2022.

 

Consultation and Advice Provided to Slum/Shantytown Programs of Architectes Sans Frontières and Medecins du Monde, Marseille, 2019

 

Volunteer at MECS/La Reynarde (home for youth in severely adverse situations), La Penne-sur-Huveaune, France, Beginning Fall 2019 (Planned)

 

Anthropology Partnership with The Schoolhouse, South Burlington, VT, 2017

 

Appointed UVM Representative on the Stewardship Team (steering committee) for the Sustainability Academy, a Burlington VT public magnet school, worked on major directions for the school, including in the larger community. 2013-2014.

 

Fostered live video conference between UVM students and street youth in India. 2008.

 

Assisted efforts to facilitate digital partnership between Vermont schools and Aboriginal schools, Northern Australia.

 

Facilitated student-run fundraiser for North Indian Street Children.

 

Facilitated, as a consulting anthropologist, multiple mediations between indigenous communities and US National Parks.

 

Ongoing support to legal and social advocacy for street-dwelling youth in Delhi.