Faculty Staff News

Patel
Photo by Kath Weston

Kath Weston joins the faculty this fall as the incoming Director of SWAG. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, she will hold a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Dr. Weston has previously directed the Women, Gender, and Sexuality program at Harvard University. She is the author of several books, including Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age and Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship. In addition to the study of gender, class, and sexuality, her areas of specialization include political economy, political ecology, historical anthropology, kinship, surveillance, and the history of science. Her latest book, Traveling Light: On the Road with America’s Poor, is based on over five years of riding the buses across the United States, talking to people about what it means to live poor in the world’s wealthiest country.

Geeta Patel is Associate Professor of Studies in Women and Gender and Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. Her book from Stanford University Press, Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings:  Gender, Colonialism and Desire in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry, reads a renegade writer through nationalism, gender, sexuality, and grief in twentieth-century Urdu poetic movements. Her work, circling around prose and poetry in Sanskrit, Urdu, Hindi, Braj and Awadhi, includes translation and short personal pieces. Her theoretical stance, informed by translation theory from South Asian studies, sexuality studies and gender theory, postcolonial, diaspora and subaltern historiography, and crossover questions from the history of science, is fashioned in her most recent manuscript Gendering the Global Nation. Her current project, Financing Selves, on risk, insurance and pensions in South Asia, opens with the early East India Company archives and closes with labor movements in contemporary Sri Lanka.

Laura Mellusi joined SWAG in June 2008 as the Office and Business Specialist. She brings a wealth of creative knowledge to the program, having worked in various museum administrative roles since 1993. She received her M.A. in Art History with an emphasis in Museum Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University. In addition to a strong passion for the arts, Laura is a mother of two. We welcome Laura as a vital addition to our office and we look forward to working with her.