Mark Auslander
Brown 204
Department of Anthropology
Brandeis University
P.O. Box 549110, MS 006
Waltham, MA 02454-9110
mausland@brandeis.edu@brandeis.edu
(781) 736-2214
AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION
Ritual. Politics. Agrarian change. Historical consciousness. African American ritual and narrative performance. Southern and Central Africa. USA.
Background and Description
Dr. Mark Auslander, Florence Kay Fellow in African Arts and Aesthetics, is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of the new interdisciplinary Master's program in Cultural Production. He is a sociocultural anthropologist with strong interests in political and symbolic processes. His principal ethnographic research has been in Eastern Zambian Ngoni communities and among African American families in rural Georgia (USA). He received undergraduate and graduate training in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. His academic writings explore a wide range of topics, including south-central African witchfinding movements, popular contests over South African nature reserves, Zulu iconography in global contexts, the social meanings of lynching photography, popular narratives of slavery in the rural American South, African American family reunions. He has consulted at the Smithsonian on the "African Voices" exhibition project and worked on "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" (at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta). With his students and community members he has collaboratively curated exhibitions of African and African American art, as well as family and cultural history. During Fall 2005 he is teaching the course "Museums and Public Memory," in which Brandeis students are using ipods to develop a digital audio walking tour of a local African American neighborhood; in Spring 2006 he and Dr. David Cunningham of the Brandeis Sociology Department will take their students on a service learning course to the Mississippi Delta to research social inequality, collective memory and popular culture in the region.