ICIS Home: Research & Funding: Post-Doctoral Fellowships: Current Post-Doctoral Fellows
Current Post-Doctoral Fellows
ICIS Post-doctoral fellow, 2006-08
We would like to welcome Christopher Krupa, our incoming postdoctoral fellow for the 2006-7 and 2007-8 academic years. Krupa is a social anthropologist from the University of California, Davis, who has spent much of the last decade studying the political, economic, and cultural construction of Latin American rurality, past and present. His work has been primarily concerned with understanding the peculiar ways that states operate in areas that appear to be marginal to them, areas like the high Andean region of Cayambe, Ecuador, where he spent over two years conducting ethnographic and archival research for his doctorate. In his dissertation, “State by Proxy: Race Politics, Labor, and the Shifting Morphology of Governance in Highland Ecuador,” Krupa shows how private agrarian enterprises have operated for centuries as state-like structures in Cayambe, particularly in the ways that rural indigenous peoples have been absorbed into them as both workers and political subjects. He is interested in how this articulation between class, race, and governance continues to impinge upon the construction of indigenous political practice in the present, as Cayambe becomes at once a pivotal location for Ecuador’s indigenous social movement and the heart of its new capitalist plantation sector producing export roses for North American markets. He is currently preparing a book manuscript that examines contemporary struggles around rural property mapping and land taxation projects in the Americas, struggles which are coming to involve global powers like the World Bank, domestic political elites, export capital, and various coalitions of the rural poor.
Krupa grew up in Northern Ontario (Canada) but pursued his interest in agrarian politics by living throughout the 1990s in peasant communities around the Caribbean and Central America and working in critical collaboration with a number of local and international development agencies. He returned on occasion to Canada to earn a BA (1996) and an MA (1997) in Anthropology from the University of Toronto.
At Emory, Krupa will join the ICIS Steering Committee and will be an active contributor to all components of our States of Inclusion program. He will be teaching one course per semester and will offer mentoring services to undergraduate students who plan to conduct ethnographic field work for their honors theses.
ICIS Post-doctoral fellow, 2005-07
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Kenneth MacLean, from The University of Michigan, as the ICIS Post-doctoral Fellow for the 2005-06 and 2006-07 academic years. A specialist of Southeast Asia, Dr. MacLean's thesis is, "The Art of Partial Disclosure: Peasant-Bureaucrats and State Socialism in Viet Nam." MacLean’s work draws upon a broad range of ethnographic and historical sources to reconfigure Vietnamese socialist history from a post-colonial perspective. His professional background includes program direction and consulting with Earth Rights International, particularly in relation to Burma, and he has also been engaged with poverty reduction programs in Viet Nam. Dr. MacLean speaks Vietnamese, Thai, Northern Thai, and has intermediate knowledge of Lao and Spanish. This past spring, he defended his doctoral thesis in Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Dr. MacLean received his BA in Anthropology from Princeton University and two Master's degrees from the University of Michigan - an MA in Anthropology and an MS in Resource Policy and Behavior.
While at Emory, Dr. MacLean will teach one course per semester, will be a member of the ICIS Steering Committee, and will be integrally involved in the development of seminars and related activities in the ICIS “Globalization and Empire” program. He comes to us from Michigan with his wife Dr. Juliet Feibel and their young son, Ascher. Dr. Feibel is presently the Associate Director of Imagining America, a national consortium of colleges and universities committed to public scholarship in the arts and humanities. We welcome them to Atlanta and to Emory.