People

Principal Coordinator: Dr. Peter F. Biehl (Department of Anthropology/Archaeology)

Co-Coordinators:

Graduate Students:

Individual Research of Group Members:

Dr. Barbour brings a Pre-hispanic new world perspective to the group. He has researched approaches from various disciplines to understanding societal forces and events that affect differing patterns of change in art, architecture, ceramic pottery and terra-cotta figurines in two highland ancient Mesoamerican cultures seven hundred years apart. The affect of time on memory, the creation of history and theories of transformation are at the heart of an important, active and often bitter debate on the “closeness” of Aztec culture to the earlier Teotihuacan culture. He will present research that suggests that a complex and chaotic pattern of differential memory loss followed by the creation of history, link these two cultures. The post Teotihuacan figurines represent lost metaphors that become reinterpreted when found by later highland cultures including the Aztecs. This workshop is the ideal format to expand theoretical approaches to questions time and memory as reflected in art, archaeology and history. 

Dr. Warren Barbour
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
State University of New York at Buffalo
380 MFAC - Ellicott Complex
Buffalo, NY 14261-0026
Phone: (716) 645-2414, ext. 131
Fax: (716) 645-3808
http://anthropology.buffalo.edu/Faculty/barbour.htm

Dr. Biehl will bring to the group his interest in the relationship between materiality, spatiality and temporality. He views archaeology as an anthropology of the past as it intersects with social theory to explore the materialization of memory and identity. He is therefore keen to learn more about different conceptions of time and memory in neighboring disciplines. While archaeologists can explore memorizations over a vast span of time, space and cultures he focuses in a current research project on social and symbolic memory and the role it plays in the creation of identity in past societies. Much of his published work is concerned with “time marks” or “memory anchors” such as prehistoric monumental circular enclosures, which make the passage of time visible in the perceived landscape. He studies alternative metaphors for understanding temporality, processes of growth and development (such as seasonal rhythms and the human lifespan), which also have spatial referents – annual rhythms of activities, points of memory for human life stories, and historical moments fixing and synchronizing time and creating social cohesion. He will be presenting parts of his research in the workshop.

Dr. Peter F. Biehl
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
State University of New York at Buffalo
380 MFAC- Ellicott Complex
Buffalo, NY 14261-0005, USA
Phone: (716) 645-2414, ext. 142
Fax: (716) 645-3808
http://anthropology.buffalo.edu/Faculty/Biehl.htm

Dr. Dyson: As an archaeologist and historian I have constantly to deal with questions of memory, its construction and its deconstruction. The Romans were a strongly ‘historical’ people, who were conscious of the role of the monument in both preserving and manipulating memory. My recently completed book Rome: the Megalopolis (Hopkins Press: 2008-2009) deals extensively with such issues in the changing ancient city. Much of my recent research and publication has concentrated on the history of classical archaeology. It is an area, where the construction, deconstruction, and creation of memory play a large role. The current focus of my research is a book length study Archaeology, Ideology, and Urbanism in 19th and 20th Century Rome which I am writing for Cambridge University Press. It deals to a large degree with the way in which monuments and the general archaeological record is altered to create associations which reinforce current dominant ideology. Fascist Rome with its massive excavation and monument restoration program designed to connect Mussolini with the imperial past is the most famous example of the use of ‘archaeological memory’, but other examples abound in Papal, Risorgimento, and even post World War II Rome.

Dr. Stephen L. Dyson
Park Professor of Classics, University at Buffalo Distinguished Professor
Department of Classics
State University of New York at Buffalo
338 MFAC – Ellicott Complex
Buffalo, NY 14261
Phone: (716) 645-2154, ext. 111
Fax: (716) 645-2225
http://www.classics.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/stephen_dyson/

Dr. Frisch has been interested, through his theoretical and applied work, in how memory and historical consciousness are intertwined in personal narrative and oral histories. He has been exploring this relationship especially in vernacular oral histories “from the bottom up,” where subjects are too-often understood as providing narrowly personal testimonies misperceived as restricted to either factual information or to expressive and emotive dimensions. Instead, he argues, we need to develop better capacities to read such documents as sources for analytic and critical engagement with both personal and social history. His current work with new software tools for directly indexing audio and video documentation engages some of these questions in more methodological terms, showing how expansive metadata frameworks map the rich complex of meanings and implications embedded in the orality and expressivity of recorded interviews and performative documentation.

Dr. Michael H. Frisch
Professor of History and American Studies; Senior Research Scholar
Department of American Studies
State University of New York at Buffalo
1010 Clemens Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260-4630
Phone: (716) 645-2181, ext. 531
Fax: (716) 645-5954
http://www.americanstudies.buffalo.edu/people/faculty/frisch/

Dr. Gaynor works on the ethnography and history of maritime worlds, with a focus on “sea people” in Southeast Asia. Her current work explores two complementary aspects of their historical representation. On the one hand she looks at how and why European representations of sea people changed over time. Europeans eventually tried to distinguish, categorically, who among Southeast Asian maritime people were harmless animist sea nomads and who among them were ruthless Islamic piratical raiders and slavers. On the other hand, Gaynor uses both oral and manuscript versions of sea people's renditions of the past to understand how they view their “history.” She analyzes what these unique materials suggest about the relationship between a migratory maritime past with no collective “home,” forms of social subordination, narrative transformation, and processes of forgetting. Her work thus disrupts the familiar relationship between places of collective origin (real or construed) and notions of memory and history. At the same time, she is deeply concerned with how the unsaid and unsayable - the tacit, the taken for granted, and subjugated knowledge - structure memory and history and therefore play a role in its representation.

Dr. Jennifer L. Gaynor
Assistant Professor
Department of History
State University of New York at Buffalo
546 Park Hall
Buffalo, NY 14260
Phone: (716) 645-8404, ext. 553
Fax: (716) 645-5954
http://www.cas.buffalo.edu/depts/history/people/gaynor.shtml

Dr. Lanz will contribute to the group through his interest in the relationship between culture and temporality, specifically in the context of migration. His research focuses on the role of temporality in migratory contexts where memory is frequently deployed as a strategy to remember, in a sublimating fashion, the lost homeland. He is interested in what such practices of remembrance accomplish for migrants, especially for their present, lived experience in their new homelands and their relationship to the former homeland. Lanz approaches this topic from a constructivist perspective that understands temporality, in a Derridian fashion, as a temporal spacing, which allows subjects to organize their existence in a meaningful way for their specific life-worlds; from this perspective, temporality thus becomes the principal way for a cultural understanding of self and group by linking them in subjective processes. He is presently writing a book on the relationship between temporality and culture and will present chapters of it in the workshop.

Dr. Tilman Lanz
Research and Postdoctoral Scholar
Department of Anthropology
State University of New York at Buffalo
380 MFAC - Ellicott Complex
Buffalo, NY 14261-0026
Phone: (716) 645-2414, ext. 134
Fax: (716) 645-3808
http://anthropology.buffalo.edu/Faculty/

Dr. Mack works on the literature and historiography of the British Enlightenment. Her recent book investigates conceptions of historical context, historical consciousness, and the intersection of literature and history, both in the Enlightenment and in current philosophy and literary theory. Her research shows that, although history and literature are now often defined in opposition to each other, Enlightenment writers (in a wide range of genres) did not consider that to be the case. She argues that literature allows these writers to experiment with relations between the categories of “experience” and “history”: they ask how both are related to the individual, how history serves as an aspect of consciousness, and how history is related to temporality. Her on-going work focuses on the prehistory of the idea of “culture,” in travel writing, philosophy and literature of the same period. She is particularly interested in how earlier writers have viewed aspects of society - such as “customs” or “habits” - in relation to memory and time.  

Dr. Pollock’s current research interests include anthropological approaches to the exotic culture of high-tech tertiary care medicine, including special attention to institutions that embody ‘memory’ in ways that constrain and enable their behavior over time. He is focusing on research/teaching hospitals as sites in which the tension between innovation and tradition, or research and treatment, for example, require that experiences of multiple frameworks of time and memory be negotiated.

Dr. Robert is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education. Her research explores the relation of social equity, educational labor, and educational policy. In particular, she has been concerned with the impact of large-scale educational reform on the equality, equity, and quality of high school social studies teachers' work. Dr. Robert has lived and taught in three nations: the United States, Costa Rica, and Argentina. She attempts to bring to her classes global and diverse perspectives on educational issues that cut across distances, languages, and borders. Trained in history and social science, and certified as a social studies teacher, her qualitative approach to research strives for holistic and contextualized understandings of educational phenomena. In a current project she studies concepts of ‘Time’ and ‘Memory’ in History school books.

Dr. Zubrow: I am actively doing research on the geography of social policy in particular heritage and disability.  Presently, I have large grants for archaeological field work as well as spatial and temporal synthesis in Finland and Northern Canada.  It is an international project-studying cultural adaptation to climate change from 7000-2000BC. Second, the public perception of heritage project examines how heritage is understood in different cultures and by differing stakeholders.  Third, I also have a grant for research on the Landscape of Literacy and Disability as well as a "media monitoring" grant  as part of Disability Rights Promotion International project. All of these projects are concerned with cultural attributes distributed across space and time and how these were and are perceived and remembered.

Dr. Ezra Zubrow
Professor
Department of Anthropology
State University of New York at Buffalo
380 MFAC - Ellicott Complex
Buffalo, NY 14261-0026
Phone: (716) 645-0411
Fax: (716) 645-3808
http://anthropology.buffalo.edu/Faculty/zubrow.htm

Coordinators on Leave

Dr. Bacigalupo will bring to the group her interest in the relationship between historical consciousness, personal and social memory, and the innovative use of different modes of remembering (textual, material, embodied, narrative). She is particularly interested in memory-making by indigenous people and in religious/spiritual contexts. Western discourses have portrayed rationality and linear history as the tenets of civilization. Bacigalupo is interested in exploring how indigenous historical imagination, irrationality, and spirituality transform Western paradigms and contribute broadly to humanistic studies of meaning, history, and self.  Bacigalupo’s current book project interweaves the spiritual dimensions of personal and collective memory to show how Chile’s indigenous Mapuche integrate narrative, textual, and embodied modes of remembering to create their own history of changing interethnic politics over time. She explores the role of spirits in the historical narratives and practices of memory employed by Mapuche shamans and their communities in southern Chile. Central to this project and to its significance for the Humanities is her effort to explore critically how Mapuche spirits and shamanic reshaping of history in ritual provide Mapuche communities with historical continuity. Bacigalupo also examines the way these communities remember, forget, and re-remember shamans and their spirits at different moments in their conflicted collective political history vis-à-vis the state. She will be presenting some of this material in the workshop.

Dr. Ana Mariella Bacigalupo
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
State University of New York at Buffalo
380 MFAC - Ellicott Complex
Buffalo, NY 14261-0026
Phone: (716) 645-2414, ext. 109
Fax: (716) 645-3808
http://anthropology.buffalo.edu/Faculty/bacigalupo.htm

Dr. Neofotistos will present work that draws from her most recent fieldwork research (spring-summer 2008) on monuments, commemoration ceremonies, and memories of the 2001 conflict between Macedonian Armed Forces and the National Albanian Liberation Army in the Republic of Macedonia. Neofotistos will examine the building of monuments to honor dead Albanian soldiers who died in the fighting, and explore commemoration not as a state-sanctioned project but rather as a project undertaken by social actors who wish to challenge the production of official memory. Additionally, Neofotistos is interested in the intersections of the personal and the national in narratives that women, Albanian soldiers, and Macedonian internally displaced persons generate in villages that were usurped by the conflict. The work presented in the workshop will form the basis for the preparation of articles for scholarly journals.

Dr. Vasiliki Neofotistos
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
State University of New York at Buffalo
380 MFAC - Ellicott Complex
Buffalo, NY 14261-0026
Phone: (716) 645-2414, ext. 120
Fax: (716) 645-3808
http://anthropology.buffalo.edu/Faculty/neofotistos.htm