Bonnie Clark, Associate Professor:  The last few years have found Bonnie Clark busy running the DU Amache Project.  A community engaged project, it is designed to help preserve, research, and interpret the site of Amache, Colorado's WWII-era Japanese American internment camp while training students in applied anthropology. Bonnie has led two field schools in archaeology and museum studies at the site and the associated Amache museum in Granada, Colorado, and will be returning in the Summer of 2012 for a third.  Those field schools bring many preservation partners together including students from Granada High School, DU undergraduate and graduate students, and former Amache internees.  Amache research and community engagement reaches into the school year for students in Bonnie's courses "American Material Culture," "Historical Archaeology," and "Advanced Anthropology." It has also been the focus of four completed MA theses, with more to come.  The project has been written up in Archaeology magazine (May/June, 2011), been featured twice on Colorado Public Radio's "Colorado Matters," and was the centerpiece of Bonnie's plenary speech for the 2011 Theoretical Archaeology Group USA conference.  More information about the DU Amache project is available.

The 2011-2012 school year will be an exciting one for Bonnie.  This Fall will see the publication of On the Edge of Purgatory: An Archaeology of Place in Hispanic Colorado.  The book chronicles Bonnie's archaeological research on Hispanic labor, gender, and landscapes at the end of the 19th Century.  It is among the first in a new series on the archaeology of the American West co-published by The Society for Historical Archaeology and University of Nebraska Press.  Bonnie is also humbled to have been chosen by her fellow DU faculty as this year's United Methodist Teacher/Scholar.  The award was presented this Fall at convocation.  Students in Bonnie's "Fundamentals of Arcaheology" class continue learning how to trace obsidian artifacts back to their original geological source, work supported by a National Science Foundation grant.  Bonnie is looking foward to teaching some of her other favorite classes, including "The Archaeology of Gender" and the Amache field school.  If you are interested in visiting the site while the DU crews are conducting research, please contact Bonnie.

 

Richard Clemmer-Smith, Professor: Richard spent a pleasant and productive sabbatical in 2009-10 developing the genesis of a new project: understanding the negotiation, parameters and implementation of indigenous peoples' human rights.  With passage of the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007, determining just how those rights are to be defined - and just who is "indigenous" has achieved new levels of importance.  An initial step is to catalogue the bases that have been identified by the United Nations as well as by non-governmental organizations (NGOs).  With this goal in mind, and assisted with a small grant from Faculty Research Grant, Dean of Arts, Humanities and Social Science's Faculty Research Fund, Richard started an excel spreadsheet.  Aided by research assistants to Christina Farnsworth (MA 2008), Robynne Locke (MA, 2009) and Ashley Pollock (BA, 2010), he was able to summarize several hundred such cases.  Partnering with Penrose Library, Richard moved the data into a user-friendly website.  It can be accessed here.  Type "Indigenous" in the box, then "return". 

Two venues provided Richard with opportunities to present the rationale and preliminary steps in this project: "These Are Not Your Father's Tribes: Indigenous peoples, Identities and NGOs". The Fifth Hawaii International Conference on Arts & Humanities. Honolulu and "Where the HRAF Left Off: Indigenous Peoples, Environmental Issues and Mediators" at the American Anthroplogical Association Annual Meetings in New Orleans.  Following the Hawaii conference, Carolyn joined him for a week on Hawaii - the "Big Island" where we gorged on papayas, seafood, and exotic potatoes from Japan; indulged in surprisingly good, reasonably priced restaurant meals; swam, kayaked and sunned on sandy beaches; luxuriated in a rain forest B&B.

In New Orleans, from his French Quarter hotel, Richard walked the quarter and also the early 19th-century neighborhoods of Treme and Marigny-Bywater.  Although flooded during Katrina, these neighborhoods sustained less damage than other areas, such as the lower Ninth Ward.  Quiet streets with flower-festooned balconies, hole-in-the-wall grocery store-restaurants, blue-and green- shuttered windows and doors in the mornings gave way to Dixieland, blues, and old-timey bluegrass street bands in the afternoons on Royal Street, and to raucous neon-blazing bars blaring live electrified Zydeco and rock on Bourbon Street every evening.

In July 2011 Richard took on the Directorship of the University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology Joint Doctoral Program in the Study of Religion (a 3-year appointment).  The program has more than 50 doctoral students who take classes from faculty in more than a dozen DU departments as well as from faculty at Iliff.

Selected Publications:

2009          “’Pristine Aborigines’ or ‘Victims of Progress’? The Western Shoshone in the Anthropological Imagination” Current Anthropology 50(6):849-84

2009           "The Ambient Role of Law for Native Americans: Land Rights, Claims and Western Shoshones: The Ideology of Loss and the Bureaucracy of Enforcement” PoLAR (Journal of the Association of Political and Legal Anthropologists) 32(2):279-311

2009          “Native Americans: The First Conservationists? An Examination of Shepard Krech III’s Hypothesis with Respect to the Western Shoshone” Journal of Anthropological Research 65:555-74

Larry Conyers, Professor: Larry Conyers continues his work with ground-penetrating radar at many sites around the world, and is in preparation of his third book on the subject. Winter of 2010 he traveled to Australia to work with an Aboriginal community on their ancestral cemetery. This last summer he was in the Gamo Highlands of Ethiopia mapping the sediments in caves and rockshelters, looking for evidence of early agricultural activities. His other research interests have been drawn to the Hohokam area of southern Arizona where he has been working at a number of Classic Period sites and also early Agricultural sites along the Santa Cruz River. Working with other archaeologists in the Tucson area he has been involved in mapping canals and agricultural fields that appear to date to about 2500 BC, which makes these features the oldest of their kind in North America.

 

M. Dores Cruz, Assistant Professor: In 2010 I continued to expand my research in Mozambique, focusing on ethnographic research in Mandlakaze that addressed the centrality of sacred trees and tree groves in the construction of local memory. Some trees and tree groves are considered sacred because identified with ancestral figures with considerable political roles in local history. Such trees materialize and map past events in the region, highlighting the role of landscapes (particularly historic and sacred landscapes) in the construction of local memory. In addition, I continued to expand my research about Mozambique's official, post-colonial narratives of the past by conducting investigation at the Museum of Revolution in Maputo.

During the Summer of 2011, with support from the University of Denver, a grant from the State Historical Fund, and the collaboration of a team of graduate students and Colorado archaeology professionals, I continued to develop a project at The Dry, an African American homesteading community south of Manzanola (SE Colorado). Research included intensive archaeological survey, Ground Penetrating Radar, archival research and interviews with homesteaders' descendants. The highlight of our field season was the beginning of a public archaeology program with an afternoon of archaeology for kids, a public presentation of the project to local populations, and an Open House at The Dry, that had the collaboration of homesteaders' descendants who shared their recollections of living at The Dry.

Don't miss the archaeology at The Dry fives minutes of fame that included local newspaper articles (today the La Junta Tribune, tomorrow the New York Times!) and a piece in Western Skies (NPR).  You can also read more about my last year's research here.

Christina Kreps, Professor: Christina has been involved in several new projects over the past few years that have kept her busy traveling internationally. Back in 2008 while teaching at the University of Bologna she found out about a project called "Museums as Places for Intercultural Dialogue," coordinated by colleagues at the Institute of Fine Art, Culture and Nature of the Emilia-Romagna Region (Instituto Beni Culturali e Natuale della Regione Emilia-Romagna--IBC) in Bologna. MAPforID, supported by funds from the European Commission, was devoted to using the resources of museums, art and cultural organizations to address issues related to immigration and integration across Europe. Christina became interested in how several musuems were using their collections and educational programming to promote more harmonious and equitable social integration. After conducting research on the project, she was invited to give a keynote address at the closing conference in Madrid in 2009 and write the forward to their handbook. Christina's involvement with MAPforID led to an invitation to participate in another EU/EC initiative called "The Learning Museum," (LEM) funded by the Lifelong Learning Programme Gruntvig (2010-2013). The project aims to create a European network of museums and cultural heritage organizations active in the lifelong learning arena. Christina, representing the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology, is the only non-European partner and has received around $32,000 to participate in the project over the next couple of years.

In 2009 and 2010, Christina was a lecturer and resource person for the Field School on Intangible Cultural Heritage and Museums in Lamphon, Thailand organized by the Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre in Bangkok, the Asian Academy for Heritage Management, and UNESCO Bangkok. Participants came from sixteen countries to undertake training primarily in ethnographic research methods.

For her Art and Anthropology course spring term 2011, Christina worked with the Italian artist Daniele Pario Perra, the PlatteForum (a community based youth arts organization in Denver) and teens from the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver on a graffiti removal and preservation project. The exhibit "ANARCH-I-TEXT: Preserving the Writing on the Wall" was shown in the DUMA gallery from August 15-September 30. Another version of the exhibit and project will be installed in Bologna, Italy in December 2011.

Christina has also had several invitations to speak at conferences and universities over the past few years including the University of Cologne, Institute of Advanced Studies in Morphomata, Cologne, Germany; Centennial College Culture and Heritage Institue, Toronto, Canada; University College London Centre for Museums, Heritage and Material Culture Studies; Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Tropenmuseum and Reinwardt Academy/Amsterdam School of the Arts.

Publications:

2011. “Changing the Rules of the Road: Post-Colonialism and the New Ethics of Museum Anthropology.” In Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Museum Ethics in the 21^st Century Museum. Janet Marstine, ed. Routledge.  

Forthcoming 2011. Intangible Threads: Curating the Living Heritage of Dayak Ikat Weaving. In Touching the Intangible: Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. Eds. Peter Davis, Gerard Corsane, Michelle Stefano. Boydell & Brewer Ltd., in conjunction with the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies of Newcastle University.

 2010. Forward. Museums as Places for Intercultural Dialogue: Selected Practices from Europe. Simona Boda, Kirsten Gibbs, Margherita Sani, eds. Published by MAPforID Group. 

2008. “Indigenous Curation, Museums and Intangible Cultural Heritage.” In Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa, eds. Intangible Heritage. Routledge.

Jim LaVita, Professor:  My time over the last year or so has been occupied with my teaching and my creative work.  In our department I have been evaluating a new course, Folklore and Cultural Heritage, and freelancing in Digital Media Studies by team-teaching Digital Cinema and Interaction & Collaboration, both of which correlate with my creative work.  Last year, with collaborators Darwin Grosse, Cory Metcalf and Andrew Edwards, and using my dance/theater company, 3rd Law Dance/Theater, my co-director and I created major work at Denver Botanic Gardens themed on the monumental bronze sculptures of Henry Moore.  I also created the electronic media art for a collaborative evening-length dance/theater work, Bread & Salt, which spoke to the conflict between tradition and modernity. The year before, the Colorado Dance Alliance awarded my co-director and me the "Cutting Edge" Award for "innovative use of twenty-first century technology in dance."

Sarah Nelson, John Evans Research Professor: My time in the last two years has been spent in speaking, writing, and travel. I’ve given 11 talks around the US for the Archaeological Institute of America, a talk on Korea and the Silk Road at Oxford University, England, the Keynote for a meeting on Gender in East Asian Archaeology in Daejeon, South Korea, and various talks at annual meetings. My major writings include a paper on Feminist Theories and the State for Archeologies, a chapter on Gender in East Asian Coastal Archaeology for A Companion to Gender in Prehistory  and a new novel about Lady Hao of Shang China called The Jade Phoenix. Travel has included Vietnam, New Guinea, the north coast of Africa (except Libya), and a ship from Capetown, South Africa to Singapore through the Indian Ocean, stopping at large and small islands. This year I was awarded a Wellesley College Alumnae Achievement Award. The citation begins, “Archaeologist, Scholar, Feminist.” .

Ermitte Saint Jacques, Lecturer-Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow: Ermitte St. Jacques, who received her PhD from the University of Florida in 2009, is the newest member of the Anthropology faculty. Before coming to DU, Ermitte spent two years as an NSF Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she trained in social network analysis and studied the use of media technologies in maintaining transnational networks among West African immigrants in Spain.  As a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Anthropology Department at DU, Ermitte will assist in building and enhancing the cultural anthropology program by offering courses on topics such as transnational migration, race and ethnicity, and gender.

Ermitte's primary research examines the relationship between the social integration of West African immigrants in Spain and their involvement in transnational activities. Alongside her research on transnational practices and immigrant integration, Ermitte continues to study related topics involving West African immigrants in Spain. She has collaborated on a project with an anthropologist at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, José Luis Molina, on identifying the transnational social networks of immigrant entrepreneurs in Catalonia and their strategies to weather the economic crisis in Spain. She has also examined how gendered opportunities in the labor market, as well as employers' racial and religious preferences for domestic workers, encumbers West African women's abilities to pursue transnational activities, such as remittances and home construction. She has co-organized an invited session on the Senegalese diaspora, Disparate Realities: Meaning and Location in the Senegalese Diaspora, for the Association of American Anthropologists meeting in Montréal, Canada in November. At DU, Ermitte will broaden her research to examine social capital and opportunities for social mobility for second-generation immigrant youth in Spain.

Ermitte's research interest in African diasporic populations extends beyond West Africans in Europe and includes the Caribbean. She has recently published a chapter on Haitian transnational migration, Between Periphery and Center in the Haitian Diaspora, in the edited volume Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora (2011). While her chapter concerns Haitian immigrants in the Bahamas, it encapsulates the research questions that she has been investigating in her study in Spain.

Ermitte, who defines herself as an Island Girl since her parents are from the Caribbean and she grew up in South Florida, was cautioned that she would miss the ocean upon moving to Denver. Fortunately, Ermitte has not had the opportunity to miss the ocean, as she's been busy exploring the Front Range with her husband, Flemming.

Dean Saitta, Professor and Department Chair: Dean continues to give public talks about the department's archaeological work at the Ludlow Massacre site. In 2009 the site was awarded National Historic Landmark status partly on the strength of research conducted by DU, Binghamton University, and Fort Lewis College between 1997-2004. Dean is currently teaching and writing about sustainability challenges facing the American city. He muses publicly about urban issues at his blog called Intercultural Urbanism. He's closing down a $180,000 US Department of Education-European Union international curriculum development grant called "Global Cities/Global Citizenship: Transformations of Urban Area in the US and Europe." The grant supported student and faculty exchanges with the universities of Nottingham (England) and Bologna (Italy). With a couple of colleagues in DU's Daniels College of Business he recently won a $10,000 grant from DU's Institute for Enterprise Ethics to study the efficacy of current water utilization policies and practices for supporting population growth and sustainable urbanism along the Front Range. Dean continues to be active as president of the DU chapter of American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Co-President.

 Carrie Shrader, Assistant to the Chair: Carrie joined the department in October 2010 after working in the Department of Languages and Literatures since November 2009. After a busy year growing accustomed to the patterns of the department, Carrie is excited to work more in depth with departmental communications, streamline admission processes for graduate students, and help with marketing promotions for all programs. Although a native of Colorado, Carrie spent her undergraduate years in Southern California where she majored in Marketing. She spent time after college on both coasts in Los Angeles and New York City, but is happy to be back in Denver to enjoy the 300 days of sunshine. Although an International MBA candidate, Carrie is integrating herself further into the department through Larry's GPR course, in hopes of finding buried treasure someday!