Richard Bauman received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. The principal foci of his research and publications include performance, language ideology, narrative, oral poetics, and genre. He has done fieldwork in Scotland, Nova Scotia, Texas, and Mexico, historical research on early Quakers and medieval Iceland, and is currently engaged in a research project on representations of performance and public culture on early commercial sound recordings, from the mid-1890s to 1920. Prof. Bauman has served as President of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology and the Semiotic Society of America, and as Editor of the Journal of American Folklore. He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and twice holder of National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships. Prof. Bauman was appointed Distinguished Professor in 1991 and won the Distinguished Teaching and Mentoring Award of the University Graduate School in 2001. In addition to his appointment in Communication and Culture, Prof. Bauman holds appointments in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and Anthropology, and is affiliated with the programs in American Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Cultural Studies.
Publications:
Verbal Art as Performance. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1977. Reprint ed. 1984. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
Story, Performance, and Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Production of Social Inequality. With Charles L. Briggs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Winner of the Sapir Prize, Society for Linguistic Anthropology.
A World of Others' Words: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Intertextuality. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004.
"Fellow Townsmen and My Noble Constituents!": Representations of Oratory on Early Commercial Recordings. With Patrick Feaster. Oral Tradition 20(1)(2005):35-57.
Courses Taught:
C334 Ways of Speaking
C430 Native American Communication and Performance
C502 Introduction to Performance in Communication and Culture
C627 Rhetoric, Performance, and Public Culture
S727 The Concept of Genre
S727 Social Semiotics of Language I
C645 Social Semiotics of Language II
Ilana Gershon is Assistant Professor of Performance and Ethnography, Department of Communication and Culture and Adjunct Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2001. Gershon has a wide range of interests, with an ethnographic focus in the Pacific. Her previous research has compared Samoan migrant experiences in New Zealand and the United States, focusing in particular on the contrasts between how governments and migrants understand what it means to have a culture. She has two curren research projects. In her long-term research project, she is looking at Maori members of the New Zealand parliament, exploring how indigenous self-representation in the national legislature has contributed to the current Maori Renaissance. In her short-term project, she is studying how people end relationships using new forms of communication. By studying breaking up, she hopes to gain an understanding of when and how people experience new media as "new."
Publications:
2007 Outraged Indigenes and Nostalgic Migrants: Mâori and Samoan Cultural Groups in a Competitive Cultural Festival with Solonaima Collins. Teachers College Record 109 (7): 1797-1820.
2007: Viewing Diaspora From the Pacific: What Pacific Ethnographies Offers Pacific Diaspora Studies, The Contemporary Pacific 19(2).
2007: Compelling Culture: The Rhetoric of Assimilation among Samoan Community Workers in the United States, Ethnic and Racial Studies 30 (5): 787-816.
2006: Guest editor for Reflexivity in Others' Contexts, special issue of Ethnos.
2000: Guest editor for The Symbolic Capital of Ignorance, special issue of Social Analysis 44(2).
Courses Taught:
I205 International Communication
C314 Mass Media in Other Cultures
C412 Ethnicity, Class, and the Model U.S. Citizen
C415 Persuading with Words, Persuading with Culture
C446 Cultures of Democracy
C627 Networks, Systems, and Flows: Theories of Circulation
Jane E. Goodman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture and holds adjunct appointments in the Departments of Anthropology, Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures as well as in the African Studies and Cultural Studies programs. She earned her PhD in cultural anthropology from Brandeis University in 1999. Her scholarship and graduate teaching focus on issues of modernity, identity, and secularism as these are creatively articulated through performances, cultural texts, and public discourse. She has conducted extensive ethnographic and archival research with North African populations in Algeria and France. In her first book, Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video (Indiana University Press, 2005), she follows Algerian village songs as they are transformed for world music audiences, attending to their movement through new regimes of textuality into novel performance venues. Goodman is currently working on an edited volume concerned with the Algerian fieldwork of Pierre Bourdieu (with Paul Silverstein). For her next research project, she plans to take up the emergence of vernacular theater in Algeria as a site for experimentation with performances of modern citizenship. Goodman is also the editor of A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication (Blackwell, 2007, with Leila Monaghan). She serves on the editorial board of American Anthropologist. In her spare time, Goodman has performed world music with the groups Kaia and Libana.
Publications:
2005. Berber Culture on the World Stage: From Village to Video. Indiana University Press.
2003. The Proverbial Bourdieu: Habitus and the Politics of Representation in the Ethnography of Kabylia. American Anthropologist 105 (4): 782-793.
2002. The Half-Lives of Texts: Poetry, Politics, and Ethnography in Kabylia, Algeria. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 12(2):157-188.
2002. "Writing Empire, Underwriting Nation: Discursive Histories of Kabyle Berber 'Oral Texts'." American Ethnologist 29(1):86-122.
2002. "'Stealing Our Heritage?': Women's Folk Songs, Copyright Law, and the Public Domain in Algeria." Africa Today 49(1):84-97.
C422 Performance, Culture, and Power in the Middle East and North Africa
C318 Ethnography as Cultural Critique
Topic: Self, Body, Culture
C417 Power and Violence: Political Systems in Ethnographic Perspective
C401 Senior Seminar
Topic: Identity and Difference
C507 Ethnographic Research Methods in Communication & Culture
C610 Identity and Difference
C650 Ethnography and Social Theory
Topic: Middle East and North Africa
Mary L. Gray is Assistant Professor of Communication and Culture and an affiliate faculty member of the Gender Studies and American Studies Departments at Indiana University. She received her PhD in 2004 from the University of California at San Diego in Communication. Her work examines the production, representation, and consumption of queer sexualities and genders with an ethnographic focus on youth living in the rural United States. She is the author of "In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth" (Haworth Press 1999). Gray's current book project, "Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and the Queering of Rural America," explores how rural young people fashion queer senses of identity through media engagement and how performances of mass-mediated queer identities rework the rural public sphere. Gray's areas of research include: the social theory and ethnography of queer sexualities and genders; intersections of new media, social movements, and cultural identity; sociology of youth and public culture; qualitative methodologies, particularly ethnography of media and non-urban settings; and the relationship between research ethics and the construction of scientific knowledge and practice. Gray's next project will explore the negotiation of personhood in popular and scientific discourse through an ethnographic study of Institutional Review Boards, discipline-specific ethics codes, and the construction of "vulnerable" and "at-risk" populations in social scientific research.
Publications:
Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and the Queering of Rural America. Forthcoming. NYU Press.
"From Websites to Wal-Mart: Youth, Identity Work, and the Queering of Boundary Publics in Small Town, USA." American Studies. Forum on "Queer Rural Studies" edited by John Howard. Forthcoming.
2007: "Face Value." Contexts. Volume 6(2), Spring.
2004: "Finding pride and the struggle for freedom to assemble: The case of queer youth in U.S. schools" in G. Goodman and K. Carey (eds.) Critical Multicultural Conversations. Hampton Press.
1999: In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth. New York: Haworth Press.
Courses Taught:
C203 Gender, Sexuality, and the Media: Introduction to Queer Representations in Popular U.S. Cinema
C334 Current Topics in CMCL: Queering Sexuality and Gender in the Media
C337 New Media: History and Contemporary Experiences of New Media
C445 Media, Culture, and Politics: Media, Social Movements, and the Politics of Representing Dissent
C620 Media, Politics, and Power: Ethnographic Approaches to New Media: Configuring the Object of Analysis in New Media Research
C793 Seminar in Media: Performing Belonging: Queer(ing) Identities and Mediascapes
Susan Lepselter joined Indiana University in 2007 after completing an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in 2005 from the University of Texas at Austin in Folklore and Social Anthropology. Her research explores the poetics of both popular media and everyday life, focusing on themes of gender, class and the imagination, captivity narratives, and the interplay between public and private memory. She is interested as well in the boundaries between ethnography and fiction, and in new forms of expressive ethnography. Her dissertation, The Flight of the Ordinary: Narrative and Poetics, Power and UFOs in the American Uncanny, draws on fieldwork conducted in a UFO experiencers' support group in Texas, and in a community near the secretive military base in Nevada known as Area 51, a center for uncanny American conspiracy theory. In addition to her primary research, she has studied prophetic narratives in a Christian, rural Texas setting, and has published articles on Native American mythology and on the politics of mid-20th century European folklore. She holds a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in the Departments of Communication and Culture and American Studies.
Publications:
"The License." In Writing Outer Spaces, ed. Debbora Battaglia. Duke University Press, 2005.
"Why Rachel Isn't Buried in her Grave." In Histories of the Future, eds. Susan Harding and Daniel Rosenberg. Duke University Press, 2005.
"The Politics and Poetics of Folklore: The Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 1937-1947." Roma (44-45), 1998.
From the Earth Native's Point of View: The Earth, The Extraterrestrial and the Natural Ground of Home." Public Culture 9(2): 197-208, 1997.
Topic of Transformation: Some Aspects of Myth and Metaphor." Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 10: 148-160, 1993.
Courses Taught:
CMCL-C450 Gender, Culture and Narrative
CMCL-C314/ AMST 350 American Captivity
Stories of everyday life: media, ethnography and the representation of the self
Seminar: Ethnophenomenologies Discourses of Repression: The poetics and politics of American Trauma
Susan Seizer received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1997. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture and an affiliate member of the Departments of Anthropology, Folklore & Ethnomusicology, Gender Studies, and India Studies. She joined the IU faculty in 2006, having previously chaired the anthropology and gender & women's studies departments at Scripps College in southern California. Her key research and teaching interests include: humor in use; stigma, socialization and identity; ethnographic narrative; and performance studies. Her ethnographic foci are India and the U.S. Professor Seizer's primary research to date concerns the lives of popular theater artists in South India. Her book, Stigmas of the Tamil Stage, was published in 2005 and awarded the A.K. Coomaraswamy Book Prize from the Association for Asian Studies in 2007. Prior to becoming an academic, Professor Seizer performed in dance, theater, and circus. Many of her scholarly interests follow threads she first explored as a performer: improvisation; the way comedy can be used to do just about anything; and the particular exhilaration many women find in transgressing normative gender roles through public performance. Professor Seizer has published in scholarly venues that include Public Culture, American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Transition, and Heresies.
Publications:
"The Afterlife of Fieldwork Relations" & "Post-Field Positionings" in Indian Folklife, Serial No. 23, National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai, India, August 2006.
Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India. Duke University Press 2005.
"Roadwork: Offstage with Special Drama Actresses in Tamilnadu, South India.", Cultural Anthropology, V15 N 2:217-259, May 2000.
"Jokes, Gender, and Discursive Distance on the Tamil Popular Stage." American Ethnologist, V24 N1:62-90 1997.
"Paradoxes of Visibility in the Field: Rites of Queer Passage in Anthropology." Public Culture, V8 N1:73-100, Fall 1995.
Courses Taught:
C333 Stigma: Culture, Deviance and Identity
C627 Humor in Use
C502 Performance
C444 Malls, Museums, and Other Amusements: the public sphere in the modern U.S.
C415 South Asia through Performance