Researching Mexico City’s poorest women
Silvia M. Arrom
Jane’s Professor of Latin American Studies
Ph.D., Stanford University
Silvia Marina Arrom finds lots to like in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program in which she teaches. There are Jane’s Travel Grants and the annual Jane’s Essay prize, endowed anonymously by the family of a young woman who devoted her life to Latin America. There’s Brandeis’ community-engaged learning initiative, through which her students have worked with local Latinos. And there’s the Brandesian passion that drives it all.
Last year, Arrom sent students to interview Latino leaders and take oral histories. “The students went way beyond that,” Arrom says. “They discovered a lack of knowledge in the Waltham community about the area’s social-service agencies — and they responded by producing a brochure in Spanish of what resources were available and where.”
Committed to research and writing about women and the poor, Arrom is currently working on her fifth book, which focuses on women’s charity groups in Mexico.
Opening students' eyes to the world and themselves
Sarah Lamb
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Sarah Lamb acquired her love of “opening students’ eyes to new ways of looking at the world and themselves” the classical way — by opening her own eyes and finding new perspectives herself.
She started her higher education in religious studies and, she says, is “still very interested that there are so many religious groups that believe only they are the right one.” But because she became more interested in people and how they live their daily lives, she wound up an anthropologist.
A year of living in a remote Maine village, working as activities director in a nursing home, stoked that interest and added another: aging.
These interests deepened and became her scholarly focus over years spent in India, during which she lived in mud huts with thatched roofs and drew her water from a well while learning Bengali and doing fieldwork on gender, aging and everyday life.
Students and justice
draw him back
Ibrahim Sundiata
Samuel and Augusta Spector Professor of HistoryPh.D., Northwestern University
Ibrahim Sundiata came to Brandeis from the Midwest — by way of West Africa, where during his fieldwork he met the man who would recruit him to the Waltham campus.
“I liked the students a lot — that was one of the drawing cards,” Sundiata says. “Faculty is faculty, but the students had an interest in social justice.”
He taught about Africa, slavery, black-Jewish relations — then decamped for Howard University to be chairman of the history department. But after four years at Howard, he returned to Brandeis, where he teaches in the Department of History and the Department of African and Afro American Studies. In 2005 he received the Neubauer Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring.
His favorite course to teach is Comparative Race and Ethnic Relations, which focuses on the history of slavery, patterns of immigration and the configuration of race in the United States, Brazil and South Africa.