Shannon Lee Dawdy: “Fancy Assemblages: An archeology of urban players”

The ‪UNC‬ ‪Anthropology‬ ‎Colloquium‬ Series invites you to join them Monday, April 21st at 3:30pm in Hyde Hall Incubator for a talk by Shannon Lee Dawdy, Associate Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences, at the University of Chicago. The title of her talk is, “‎Fancy‬ ‪Assemblages‬: An archaeology of urban players.”

Refreshments will be served before the talk at 3:15pm.

Shannon Lee Dawdy is an anthropologist whose fieldwork combines archaeological, archival, and ethnographic methods with a regional focus on the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Mexico (especially Louisiana, Cuba, and eastern Mexico). Her first single-author book, Building the Devil’s Empire, offers ‘rogue colonialism’ to explain how French New Orleans, and many colonies like it, functioned outside state controls, developing a political economy loosely moored to metropolitan interests. Current themes of research and teaching include: piracy and informal economies; aesthetics, affect, and sensoria; temporality; gender and sexuality; fetish and thing theory; death and disaster; archaeology of the contemporary. She is currently completing a book called Patina: A Profane Archaeology of Spirited Things that examines the intimate relations between people and old things like antiques, heirlooms, historic houses, and ruins, based on the archaeology of New Orleans and ethnographic interviews with Katrina survivors. Other projects in the works include a book called ‘Romantic Capitalism, or Sex with Marx’ and an ethnographic study of contemporary American death practices.