Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Professor, Department Chair

About

I am Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), and President-Elect of the Society for Historical Archaeology (2010-2011).  My research interests revolve around the relationship between inequality and material consumption.  My ongoing research project examines race and racism in Indianapolis, Indiana's near-Westside since the 19th century.  Much of that work examines the systematic displacement of the neighborhood's predominately African-American community after World War II for the expansion of the Indiana University Medical Center and eventually the campus of IUPUI. 
My research is broadly concerned with examining how marginalized consumers--such as African Americans, working classes, Southerners, and contemporary subcultures--can criticize consumer culture's inequalities while they also press for privileges within that very society.  Along these lines, for instance, I have examined Barbie material culture to probe the historically complex meanings the doll's producers and consumers have forged since 1959.  I also have studied the ways doughnut consumption reflects dominant currents in twentieth-century marketing, the dynamic meanings assumed by any one commodity, the nationalist symbolism projected onto goods and marketers, and the moralizing that a host of observers associate with particular consumption patterns and goods.
In 2011 I am conducting a series of collaborative projects in the UK and Europe that examine the emergence of transatlantic consumer society.  In Spring 2011, for instance,  I conducted a pilot study of Victorian-era decorative figurines from a series of post-1700 London sites.  The project uses seemingly mundane bric-a-brac to examine patterns in Victorian ideology across the Atlantic World and assess how various consumers participated in, rejected, and negotiated dominant behavioral and decorative ideologies.  In Summer 2011 I will have a one-month visiting faculty fellowship in the Newcastle University School of Historical Studies and be part of the two-day roundtable meeting "Engaging with Oral History: New Developments in the Archaeology of 19th Century Britain” organized by Jane Webster.  That workshop will examine recent archaeological scholarship employing oral history and linking it to a broad range of material culture.  Those projects will contribute to a transatlantic sample of 18th-20th century household material goods to identify how people marginalized along class, ethnic, and regional lines viewed material culture, consumption, and citizenship.

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