Areas of Research/Interest

Race and ethnicity; social stratification; theory and method in diaspora studies; religion; the Caribbean and Latin America.

Fellowships/Honors

Fulbright, Sigma Xi Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and a Richard Carley Hunt Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship

Publications

Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad, 2004, Duke University Press.

"Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol." Cultural Anthropology 16(3):271-302, 2001.

"Portraits in the Mirror: Nature, Culture, and Women's Travel Writing in the Caribbean." Women's Writing 10(1), 2003.

"Rurality and "Racial" Landscapes in Trinidad." In Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy. Barbara Ching and Gerald Creed, editors. Pp. 39-69. NY: Routledge, 1997.

"Juthaa in Trinidad: Food. Pollution, and Hierarchy in a Caribbean Diaspora Community." American Ethnologist 21(2): 245-269, 1994.

Current News / Projects
Updated July 2009

As I look forward to 2009-2010 as my sabbatical year, I look back on this past year as one where some ends were tied up as well as initial preparations made for the year to come.  A number of my papers were published this year or are currently in press, the latter including my edited volume, Empirical Futures (University of North Caroline Press, November 2009), and I enjoyed the opportunity to give several talks, the invitations this year coming largely from international universities (the Netherlands, England, Brazil, Canada).  An immense honor was bestowed upon me in the form of an author-meets-critics panel of historians and anthropologists discussing my book, Callaloo Nation, at the University of Toronto’s “Conference on South-South Encounters Across South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.”  This spring I was invited to participate in a day-long seminar, “How Real Is Race? The Politics of Race in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on the U.S., the Middle East, and Latin America,” on teaching about race to high-school and middle-school students, sponsored by Yale University and NYU.  It was an excellent experience and truly brought home the importance of engaging with communities of faculty and students outside the campus.  Back at the university, I received a grant to fund a speaker series and new graduate seminar, “Our America: Cross Currents and Intimate Dialogues in the Making of a Hemisphere,” both scheduled for fall 2010.  Stepping outside my comfort zone, I tried my hand for the first time as Program Co-Chair for the Society for the Anthropology of Religion's annual conference, this year held jointly with the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and learned about a world of details that I had no idea existed.  As a doctoral committee member, I had the pleasure and satisfaction of seeing several graduate students in anthropology and other disciplines finish their degrees and go off to jobs and post-docs.  I also greatly enjoyed devising and teaching for the first time the departmental undergraduate honors seminar, which the honors students greatly enjoyed and which we hope to make a regular part of the curriculum.  In addition to embarking on my next book project during my sabbatical, I will have a chance to continue working on two articles that have been percolating for some time, just waiting for time to be finished; one is on the 19th and 20th century Canadian Presbyterian Mission in Trinidad, and the other on Hosay/Muharram in the Caribbean and South Africa.