Emory Anthropology is pleased to welcome five recent faculty members to the department: David Nugent, Michael Peletz, Craig Hadley, Peter Little, and Dietrich Stout.
New Faculty Research Sites
David Nugent has been Professor in the department for three years. He earned his PhD from Columbia in 1988. His field sites have been as varied as the Canadian arctic, East Africa, Peru, and the United States. Dr. Nugent’s areas of specialization include: political and economic anthropology; race, ethnicity and nationalism; Latin America; agrarian society; and the anthropology of the state. He is the award-winning author and editor of several books, including Modernity at the Edge of Empire: State, Individual and Nation in the Northern Peruvian Andes, 1885-1935, Locating Capitalism in Time and Space: Global Restructurings, Politics and Identity, and (with Joan Vincent) A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics (Choice Magazine “Outstanding Academic Title of 2004”). At Emory, Dr. Nugent also serves as Director of the Program in Latin American and Caribbean Studies.
Michael Peletz also joined the department in Fall 2006. He was awarded his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1983. His teaching and research interests focus on social and cultural theory, gender, sexuality, kinship, law, religion (especially Islam), social history, and modernity, particularly in Malaysia, Indonesia, and other parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Rim. Professor Peletz has done extensive fieldwork in Malaysia and has undertaken archival research in Malaysia and England. His research has also taken him to Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, and Vietnam. Dr. Peletz spent the 2005–2006 academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he worked on a book project titled Diversity, Legitimacy, and Inequality: Gender Pluralism in Muslim and Buddhist Southeast Asia Since Early Modern Times. Dr. Peletz has taught courses at Emory on anthropological theory, gender and sexuality, Southeast Asia, and is set to teach a new course on law and discipline.
Craig Hadley joined the department in Fall 2007. He received his PhD from the University of California, Davis in 2003. Following his doctoral training, Dr. Hadley completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. For three years, he also served as a Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholar at the Center for Social Epidemiology and Population Health at the University of Michigan. Since coming to Emory, Dr. Hadley has taught Concepts and Methods in Biological Anthropology, Nutritional Anthropology, Introduction to Global Health, Biocultural Approaches to Food and Nutrition, and Demographic Anthropology. Dr. Hadley brings to Emory a unique combination of population studies, nutrition, and public health.
Peter Little came to Emory in Fall 2008 and began teaching this spring. He received his PhD from Indiana University and prior to coming to Emory served as Professor and Chair of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Much of Dr. Little’s work has taken place in East Africa, where he specializes in development and globalization, political economy of agrarian change, pastoralism, environmental politics and change, informal economies and statelessness, and food insecurity. Dr. Little has supervised more than ten doctoral students and six post-doctoral researchers and has collaborated with scholars and programs at many international institutions – including Oxford University, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Kyoto University, University of Nairobi, University of Ghana, Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique), and Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Dr. Little will also serve as Director of Emory’s new program in Development Studies.
Dietrich Stout will become the most recent addition to the department this fall, traveling across the Atlantic. He received his PhD in 2003 from Indiana University and has served as Lecturer in the Archaeology of Human Evolution at University College London. At UCL, he has taught Cognitive Evolution and Early Technology, Ethnoarchaeology and experimental archaeology, and Ethnoarchaeology. His research interests include brain and language evolution, lithic technology, cultural psychology, cognitive neuroscience, the anthropology of technology, experimental archaeology, and ethnoarchaeology. Dr. Stout uses functional neuroimaging, including PET and fMRI, to investigate the neural bases of Early Stone Age tool making skills. He is also investigating the technology and material selection of the earliest stone toolmakers as part of the Gona Paleoanthropological Research Project in Afar, Ethiopia to learn about the evolution of human cognition. Dietrich Stout and Jim Rilling will offer students a unique opportunity to study the evolution of the brain and its implications for cultural development.