All anthropology graduate work at Purdue University is fully funded. I am recruiting students interested in political ecology and agriculture, especially those asking questions about how to build resilient and just agricultural systems in the 21st century. Potential students may have a range of disciplinary backgrounds including anthropology, environmental science, agricultural economics, or ecology.
If you are interested in working with me, please write to me and refer to the Purdue University graduate program for specific program guidelines. If you write, please let me know what kinds of work you are interested in doing, what your career goals are, and what kinds of anthropological scholarship you are interested in reading and creating. You don’t necessarily have to have a robust anthropology background to apply, but you must be clear as to why you want to do research in the field of anthropology in particular.
I supervise students in field and classroom settings, including formal and informal supervision as well as writing and professionalization workshops for graduate students. I love to work around issues of writing, research design, theory, and teaching pedagogy. Students working with me will be asked to revise their work, peer review others’ work, and give oral presentations.
Current primary advisees include Jose Becerra, Fionna Fahey, Patricia Mathu
I advise, mentor, or otherwise work with students interested in exploring the links between social and ecological systems, especially with respect to interests in agrarian systems, fermentation and the microbiome, political ecology, development, ethnobiology, food studies, environmental justice, and living with climate change. I have ongoing field projects in South India, Bosnia, and the American Midwest, but students need not be geographically limited by this.
Pre-dissertation
Students in this phase will devote their time to coursework, private readings on their area of specialty, teaching and research duties, and preliminary data collection. At this stage, the critical tasks involve identifying research questions and familiarizing ourselves with the relevant scholarship in preparation for qualifying and preliminary exams. Through a targeted private reading, students will create a massive literature review outlining the relevant conversations in their specialty, important theoretical context, and previous work done in the proposed geographic region(s). Students should also be writing grants for organizations including the Ford Foundation, National Science Foundation, and the Wenner Gren Foundation to fund ongoing research work. Students will ideally conduct preliminary field research in their first summer and return with pilot data upon which to write grants, publish research, and propose a full dissertation project. Terminal Master’s students will take their first year to design a concrete project and spend their second year implementing it, alongside a series of public science communications.
Dissertation research
Students in this phase, often beyond their third year in the program, will write grants to fund their research and conduct major data collection. Students will be expected to return to Purdue or attend a major conference in the midst of fieldwork to provide an opportunity to frame research and receive feedback.
Post-dissertation research
Upon completion of major fieldwork, students will be expected to return to Purdue to write up their findings as a dissertation alongside other writing work: spinning off articles for peer-reviewed venues, blogs and reports for a public audience, public talks to relevant audiences, reports to stakeholders, and other relevant means of communication. Students aspiring to academic work will also arrange to teach courses as instructors of record. Students aspiring to non-academic work will pursue opportunities that establish their credentials for private, public, and NGO positions, including administrative work, writing, and designing workshops.