SAAB Faculty Research Highlights

Mary Hancock’s new book, The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai, will be released in December 2008 by Indiana University Press. In it, she analyzes the expressions of collective memory and nostalgia that have taken shape in Chennai’s public spaces, considering how new modes of class formation and cultural and religious nationalisms intersect in debates around the representation of local pasts.

Michael Jochim was recently elected to become a Corresponding Member of the German Archaeological Institute. Read more about Professor Jochim’s ongoing projects dealing with southern Germany’s prehistory.

Stuart Smith’s research centers on the civilizations of ancient Egypt and Nubia. He is particularly interested in the identification of ethnicity in the archaeological record and the ethnic dynamics of colonial encounters. The origins of the Napatan state, whose rulers conquered Egypt, becoming Pharaohs of the 25th Dynasty, provides the focus of his current archaeological research.  He is presently involved in two major projects: the UCSB University Dongola Reach Expedition, Tombos Excavations and the UCSB-ASU Fourth Cataract Archaeological Expedition, a part of the Merowe Dam Archaeological Salvage Project. [link to Smith webpage] He was honored in 2006 with an invitation to present 2006 Kirwan Memorial Lecture  at the British Museum.

Susan Stonich works on the conflicts and contradictions between economic development and environmental conservation efforts in coastal zones in the context of climate change; environmental justice; vulnerability and resilience to climate related hazards and disasters; international tourism; and aquaculture (particularly shrimp and shellfish farming).  She works primarily in Central America and the Caribbean but has also worked in South-East Asia. Currently, she co-directs (with Dr. Sara Alexander of Baylor University) a research project in the Mesoamerican Reef System funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program, From Vulnerability to Resilience: Helping People and Communities Cope with Crises.  Professor Stonich is also working with the National Shellfisheries Association, the World Wildlife Fund Mollusc Dialogue, and NOAA Aquaculture and Habitat Conservation Program on a project to help determine standards on North American shellfish farming that are socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable.

Amber VanDerwarker’s interests in foodways studies, including the origins and maintenance of agricultural systems and the overlap between gender and food-related activities are represented in her recent book, Farming, Hunting and Fishing in the Olmec World (University of Texas Press).   Professor VanDerwarker is currently conducting survey and excavation research with Dr. Philip Arnold (supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation) at the Classic-period site of Teotepec, located in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, southern Veracruz, Mexico.  This ambitious field project will document the role of Teotepec in the broader Mesoamerican exchange system that is a hallmark of the Classic period. 

Casey Walsh’s new book, Building the Borderlands: A Transnational history of Irrigated Cotton Along the mexico-Texas Border was recently published by Texas A&M University Press. In it, he analyzes the cultural history and political ecology of irrigated cotton agriculture in the US-Mexican borderlands over the past century.

Greg Wilson examines the origins of social complexity in North America in his book on the Moundville site complex in the southeastern US.  That book, The Archaeology of Everyday Life at Early Moundville, was recently published by the University of Alabama Press.