Research and Publications

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Research and Publications

Faculty Bookshelf
Research Interests
Recent Publications
Current Grants & Projects

Faculty Bookshelf

The Ethics of Staying: Social Movements and Land Rights Politics in Pakistan

Mubbashir Rizvi

In The Ethics of Staying, Mubbashir A. Rizvi presents an original framework for understanding the Anjuman Mazarin Punjab (AMP), one of the largest, most successful land rights movements in South Asia. This group of Christian and Muslim tenant sharecroppers, against all odds, successfully resisted Pakistan military's bid to monetize state-owned land, making a powerful moral case for land rights by invoking local claims to land and a broader vision for subsistence rights.

69��ý Institute of Pakistan Studies 2021 Book Prize

Landscapes of Care: Immigration and Health in Rural America

Thurka Sangaramoorthy

Drawing from fieldwork that centers on Maryland's sparsely populated Eastern Shore, Sangaramoorthy shows how longstanding issues of precarity among rural health systems along with the exclusionary logics of immigration have mutually fashioned a "landscape of care" in which shared conditions of physical suffering and emotional anxiety among immigrants and rural residents generate powerful forms of regional vitality and social inclusion.

Honorable Mention, 2023 Society for the Anthropology of North America Book Prize
Honorable Mention, 2024 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award, Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section, 69��ý Sociological Association.

Drawing the Sea Near: Satoumi and Coral Reef Conservation in Okinawa

C. Anne Claus

How Japanese coastal residents and transnational conservationists collaborated to foster relationships between humans and sea life

Drawing the Sea Near opens a new window to our understanding of transnational conservation by investigating projects in Okinawa shaped by a “conservation-near” approach—which draws on the senses, the body, and memory to collapse the distance between people and their surroundings and to foster collaboration and equity between coastal residents and transnational conservation organizations. This approach contrasts with the traditional Western “conservation-far” model premised on the separation of humans from the environment.

A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous 69��ýs, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp

Daniel O. Sayers

In the 250 years before the Civil War, the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina was a brutal landscape—2,000 square miles of undeveloped and unforgiving wetlands, peat bogs, impenetrable foliage, and dangerous creatures. It was also a protective refuge for marginalized individuals, including Native 69��ýs, African-69��ý maroons, free African 69��ýs, and outcast Europeans. In the first thorough archaeological examination of this unique region, Daniel Sayers exposes and unravels the complex social and economic systems developed by these defiant communities that thrived on the periphery. He develops an analytical framework based on the complex interplay between alienation, diasporic exile, uneven geographical development, and modes of production to argue that colonialism and slavery inevitably created sustained critiques of 69��ý capitalism.

Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt

Orisanmi Burton

Orisanmi Burton explores what he terms the Long Attica Revolt, a criminalized tradition of Black radicalism that propelled rebellions in New York prisons 69��ý the 1970s. The reaction to this revolt illuminates what Burton calls prison pacification: the coordinated tactics of violence, isolation, sexual terror, propaganda, reform, and white supremacist science and technology that state actors use to eliminate Black resistance within and beyond prison walls.

25th Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize, Finalist
Museum of African 69��ý History Stone Book Award Shortlist 2024

The Archaeology of the Homed and the Unhomed

Daniel Sayers

Sayers builds a conceptual model that focuses on the connection between the unhomed and the home and uses it to generate new insights into pre–Civil War communities of Maroons and Indigenous 69��ýs, Great Depression–era hobo communities, and Midwest farmsteads. In doing so, he highlights the social complexities, ambiguities, and significance of the home and the unhomed in the archaeological record. Using a variety of data sources including documentary records and material culture and drawing on extensive fieldwork, Sayers illuminates how homelessness can be created, reproduced, and disparaged by the dominant culture.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit For Collaborative Community Research

Thurka Sangaramoorthy and Karen Kroger

This book provides provides a practical guide to understanding and conducting rapid ethnographic assessments (REAs) with an emphasis on their use in public health contexts. This team-based, multi-method, relatively low-cost approach results in rich understandings of social, economic, and policy factors that contribute to the root causes of an emerging situation and provides rapid, practical feedback to policy makers and programs.

Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention

Thurka Sangaramoorthy

In Treating AIDS, Thurka Sangaramoorthy examines the everyday practices of HIV/AIDS prevention in the United States from the perspective of AIDS experts and Haitian immigrants in south Florida. Using in-depth ethnographic data, she underscores the difference between the global response to this public health crisis—where everyone is implicated as a potential carrier of risk—and the uncontested existence of racial and ethnic disparities in HIV/AIDS rates, access to treatment and care, and, especially, the stigma borne by carriers of the disease. Everyone has an equal risk for contracting HIV/AIDS, Sangaramoorthy notes, but the ways in which people experience and manage that risk—and the disease itself—is highly dependent on race, ethnic identity, sexuality, gender, immigration status, and other notions of “difference.”

Research Interests

Thurka Sangaramoorthy
Cultural and medical anthropology, global health and development, migration and refugees, climate change and environmental equity, health policy and governance, critical studies of racialization.

Mubbashir Rizvi
Social-cultural anthropology, social movements, environmental anthropology, markets, racial capitalism ��

Zev Cossin
Historical archaeology, environmental anthropology, environmental justice, restorative history and public archaeology, material culture and heritage, infrastructures of colonialism

Daniel Sayers
Historical archaeology; relevant and impactful communities; Maroons, itinerants, and self-emancipators; animals entangled in the human world; rural lives and peoples; critical theories of capitalism

Alanna Warner-Smith
Historical bioarchaeology; migration, immigration, and mobility; labor; embodiment of inequality; bioarchaeological and archaeological ethics; history of museum collections; race and racialization; anthropology of the archive

C. Anne Claus
Environment, sustainability, food studies, oceans, Japan

Zoltan Gluck Zoltán Glück
Political and historical anthropology, colonialism and postcolonialism, security and the War on Terror, critical geography and theories of space and place, racial capitalism, political economy

Orisanmi Burton
Race & racialization; Black radicalism & white supremacy; policing, criminalization & prisons; gender & masculinity; war & counterinsurgency; ethnography and archives

Manissa Maharawal
Gentrification, social movements, race and racism, urban anthropology, oral history, housing policy, technology, urban political economy

Chuck Sturtevant
Settler colonialism; Indigenous politics; race and ethnicity in Latin America; political anthropology; ethnographic documentary filmmaking; nationhood and statecraft

Recent Publications

Alanna Warner-Smith published "" in Historical Archaeology. The article reconsiders normative categories of analysis in bioarchaeology using the lens of "slow science."��
Alanna Warner-Smith's chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology (forthcoming, edited by Pamela Geller), “��Global Mobilities, Intimate Movements: Embodying Nineteenth-Century Domestic Labor,” centers domestic work in processes of industrialization and urbanization.��
Zoltán Glück recently edited a of 69��ý Anthropologist, titled “Forever War: Anthropology and the Global War on Terror,” (2024) featuring leading scholars whose work grapples with the social, political, ecological and human costs of the post 9/11 wars. His lead article titled, “” argues for an engaged and politically committed form of anthropology that seeks to directly confront punitive systems of “security.”
Alanna Warner-Smith is co-editor of Excavating Bodies in the Archives (under review, School for Advanced Research Press) and Tissues and Traces: Doing Bioarchaeology with/in the Archive (under contract with Berghahn).
Alanna ��Warner-Smith and Shannon A. Novak co-authored�� “,” published in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Anthropology.��
Manissa Maharawal’s book Anti-Eviction: Fighting Tech-Led Gentrification in San Francisco is currently under review with University of California Press. The book examines the ways that tenants in San Francisco challenge the processes of tech-led gentrification occurring in the city and how in doing so they create new landscapes of care and resistance.
Chuck Sturtevant published “” in Settler Colonial Studies.
Chuck Sturtevant published “” in Ethnos.

Current Grants & Projects

Thurka Sangaramoorthy serves as a co-investigator on a 5-year study examining policies and best practices to improve the respiratory health outcomes of migrant and seasonal farmworkers. The project, entitled "Research Employing Environmental Systems and Occupational Health Policy Analyses to Interrupt the Impact of Structural Racism on Agricultural Workers and Their Respiratory Health (RESPIRAR)," recently received supplemental funding of $77,597��from the University of Maryland, bringing the total to $165,676.
Mubbashir Rizvi’s current research focus is on informal urbanism in Karachi’s food markets, and the role of these markets in structuring relations of coexistence in the aftermath of urban violence.
Zev Cossin is currently collaborating with the Anacostia Watershed Society to connect students with the organization's efforts to research, protect and build a thriving Anacostia River watershed in the DMV.
Zev Cossin is completing article manuscripts on archaeological research of the impacts of Spanish haciendas and the resilience of laborer families over five centuries in the Ecuadorian highlands.��
Zev Cossin is engaged in ongoing lab ananlysis and interpetation of artifacts from Winnipeg Junction, MN, a railroad boomtown abandoned around 1910. He is working with a large group of devoted students to analyze, interpret, and present that research on campus and beyond.
C. Anne Claus received funding from Fulbright and the Wenner-Gren Foundation to conduct fieldwork among chefs, home cooks, and seafood advocates in Japan. Claus is also conducting research with graduate students on food waste in the DMV as part of a 5-year interdisciplinary NSF grant.
Daniel Sayers is actively involved in a collaborative interdisciplinary project focused on an 18th Century Maroon fortress located along the Savannah River; an essay on the project and its initial field survey for the fortress site appeared in the New Yorker in June of 2023.
Daniel Sayers continues to develop his research design and projects for his “Archaeology, Species, and Human Entitlement Study”.
Daniel Sayers is busily working with media companies on developing television and streaming projects to bring archaeology and past peoples into public awareness and dialogues.
Orisanmi Burton was recently awarded a 2024 research stipend from the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) to support his research into the history of biomedical experimentation on incarcerated people and other vulnerable populations.
Manissa Maharawal is a co-lead investigator on the NIH funded project “Examining the Effects of Housing, Structural Racism and Policy Change on Health.”
Chuck Sturtevant is currently working on a book that explores the colonization of Bolivia’s “Amazonian frontier” as a settler colonial project. This research challenges the uncritical application of Anglocentric racial ideologies to settler colonial projects in Latin America and expands the applicability of settler colonial theory to help us understand the ways that national identity and state sovereignty are intertwined through processes of violence, erasure, and forgetting.