Faculty

Meet the Anthropology and Sociology Faculty

Faculty in anthropology and sociology and their interests are shown below. Contact individual faculty members via their linked profile pages.

Lawrence Breitborde
Professor of Anthropology and Dean of the College
Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1978
"For more than thirty years, I have been studying change in the lives of urban west Africans. Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the most intense locales for changes in the lifeways and values of people, with some of the highest rates of urbanization in the world, and extensive and complex multilingualism."

Jon Wagner
Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D., Indiana University, 1975
"My present research interests converge on how we as a culture envision the development of social cooperation, from its beginnings in human evlution to the utopian experiments of the present and our pop-culture fantasies of the future."

Amy Singer
Associate Professor of Anthropology-Sociology
Ph.D., University of Washington, 2005
"My new research study, of Balinese sea salt, extends questions of cultural production and commodification, while connecting to questions of globalization, commerce, and consumption."

William Hope
Assistant Professor of Anthropology-Sociology
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009

Gabrielle Raley
Assistant Professor of Anthropology-Sociology
Ph.D., University of California-Los Angeles, 2010
"Overall, I am interested in connecting the big stuff of social life-markets, power, price, beauty, and love-with the smallest moments of everyday meaning-making and interpretation."

Deborah Smith
Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology-Sociology
Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2011
"My fields of interest include sociology of work, occupations and organizations, sociology of consumption, sociology of culture, and sociology of gender and sexualities."

David Amor
Instructor of Journalism and Anthropology
M.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1986
"I am interested in the complex interplay among journalists and other media producers, the organizations they work for, larger social and political institutions, and the imaginative and material lives of the ordinary people who work, play, think and dream in a world saturated by the mass media."

Distinguished Research Affiliates in Anthropology
James L. Watson
Social anthropology, migration and diasporas, food systems, China
Rubie S. Watson
Family and kinship, gender, history and anthropology, China

Cooperating Faculty from Other Programs

Diana Beck
Professor of Educational Studies
Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1997
"Working with two Navajo teachers on a fry bread research project and presenting it with them at the Navajo Studies National Conference was a very proud moment for them and their school-and for me."

Sarah Day-O'Connell
Associate Professor of Music
Ph.D., Cornell University, 2004
"I am writing a book on the English Canzonetta, a genre of song popular in the late 18th century.

Jason Helfer
Associate Professor of Educational Studies
Ph.D., University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, 2003

Fredrick L. Hord
Professor of Black Studies
Ph.D., Union Graduate School, 1987
"My most immediate projects are in the areas of Black Studies theory, African American literary criticism, Black psychology traditions, and the status of Blacks in Latin America."

Duane Oldfield
Associate Professor of Political Science
Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley, 1992
"I am currently working on a book to be titled Confronting the New World Order: Labor, the Christian Right, and the Politics of Globalization.

Lecturers

Wendel Hunigan
Lecturer in Anthropology and Sociology
M.S., Illinois State University, 1971

Emeritus Faculty
Jack Dean Fitzgerald
Professor Emeritus of Sociology