Faculty Guide

Title

Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Director of the Interdisciplinary M.A. Program in Cultural Production

African and Afro-American Studies
Anthropology
Cultural Production
Fine Arts

Expertise

Art, ritual and globalization. Religion. Kinship. Historical anthropology. Development. Africa. and the African Diaspora. United States.

Profile

Dr. Mark Auslander is Director of the interdisciplinary Master's program in Cultural Production and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He is a sociocultural anthropologist with strong interests in political and symbolic processes in Africa and the African Diaspora. 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 art of Southern Sudanese refugees, the social meanings of lynching photography, popular narratives of slavery in the rural American South, and African American cemeteries and 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. With his graduate and undergraduate students, he works closely with historically-excluded communities in the greater Boston area and elsewhere to develop collaborative exhibition and cultural enrichment projects. Dr. Auslander also serves as coordinator of the Greater Boston Anthropology Consortium.

Courses Taught

ANTH	1a	Introduction to the Comparative Study of Human Societies
ANTH	112a	African Art and Aesthetics
ANTH	133a	Culture and Power in Africa
ANTH	159a	Museums and Public Memory
ANTH	182b	Engaged Anthropology
ANTH	184b	Cross-Cultural Art and Aesthetics
ANTH	203b	Contemporary Anthropological Theory
CP	201a	Making Culture: Theory and Practice
CP	207b	The Practice of Cultural Production: Museum Education
SOC	156a	Social Change in American Communities

Scholarship

Auslander, Mark. "Dreams Deferred: African-Americans in the History of ¿Old Emory.¿ ,." ¿Where Courageous Inquiry Leads: Studies in the Emerging Life of Emory University¿. Ed. Gary Hauk and Sally Wolff King),. U of Georgia Press, 2009 (forthcoming)

Auslander, Mark. "Going by the Trees: Death and Regeneration in Georgia¿s Haunted Landscapes.." Electronic Antiquity, ¿Ancient Mysteries, Modern Secrets. (May 2009) (2009). (forthcoming)

Greensboro lunch counter re-installation. . Auslander, Mark. 2009.

Reflections on Chie Fueki¿s The Nature of How We See. (Visual Essay) . Auslander, Mark. 2009.

Text and Image in a Georgia Gravestone.. Auslander, Mark. 2009.

Auslander, Mark (co-authored with Bryce Peake). "YouTheory: Dialogic Adventures . March 26." Unthinking Television: Visual Culture beyond the Console, George Mason University,. March 26, 2009.

Auslander, Mark. "Remembering Slavery at Emory University.." Organization of American Historians, Seattle, WA. March 28.

Auslander, Mark. "Unfixing Origins: Alternative Genealogies in Kiki Smith's Lucy's Daughters. .." Darwin¿s Doubles: Evolution, Art and the Politics of Representation. Rose Art Museum. February 12.

Auslander, Mark. "¿We come back to Life¿: Regeneration and Traumatic Memory in a Multiracial Lynching Reenactment. ." African-American Studies Department Colloquium,. Boston University. March 11.

Kiki Smith¿s Lucy¿s Daughters.. Auslander, Mark. 2008.

Teens and Public Art. Auslander, Mark. 2008.

The Art of Stephan Thakiy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2hSinmzKn8&feature=channel_page. Auslander, Mark. 2008.

The Flags of Camp Justice.. Auslander, Mark. 2008.

Auslander, Mark (co authored with Ellen Schattschneider). "The Anthropology of Exile, Displacement and Dislocation." Society for Biblical Literature annual conference: Warfare in Ancient Israel section., Boston, MA. November 25.

Auslander, Mark ,. "Divination in the Age of DNA: (Re)reading the Entrails.." Steve Miller: Spiraling Inward. Ed. Michael Rush. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Rose Art Museum, 2008. 31-48.

Auslander, Mark. "Something Inside of Me: Reenacting a Lynching in the American South.." Brandeis University Department of Anthropology Colloquium. Waltham, MA. September 25.

Auslander,Mark. "Rites of Passage (entry)." Encyclopedia of Anthropology., 2006

Auslander,Mark (curator and organizer). In Memory¿s Grove: The Commemorative Art of. Group show (Keith Sipp and Keith Washington) Show, 2005. Dreitzer Gallery, B randeis University, Waltham, MA.

Auslander,Mark. "First Word: Assemblies: Paradoxes of Excavation and Reconstruction in Contemporary African Art.." African Arts. (2005).

Auslander,Mark. "Saying Something Now: Documentary Work and the Voices of the Dead.." Michigan Quarterly Review Fall 2005 (2005): 683-705.

Auslander,Mark. "The Blinding Mirror: Ethnographic Visibility and Invisibility in a Zambian Witchfinding Movement." American Anthropological Association Meetings (Nov. 2005), Washington D.C.. 2005.