Faculty Member
- Carmel Schrire
- Distinguished Professor, SAS
- Specialization: Prehistory, historical archeology, human ecology, hunter-gatherers; Australia, Africa
- Degree and University: PhD, Australian National U, 1968
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Office: Ruth Adams Building 202
- Office Hours: Tu 12-2 or by apptmt; Th 11-noon virtually, by apptmt
- Phone: (732) 932-9006
- Courses: 01:070:164 Archaeology Murder Mysteries, 01:070:313 Historical Archaeology
Research Interests
Carmel Schrire has done archaeological and anthropological research on topics relating to Australia, the Arctic and South Africa. She is currently engaged in a long-term program of research into the early colonial contact between Europeans and indigenous people in the Age of Mercantile Capitalism.
One of Professor Schrire's major projects involved the excavation of a small outpost of the Dutch East India Company on the shores of Saldanha Bay, Cape, South Africa. Her book Digging through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist (UVA Press 1995) sets these finds in a broad, international perspective.
Professor Schrire's latest book, Tigers in Africa: Stalking the Past at the Cape of Good Hope (University Press of Virginia, 2002), presents a brisk vision of the scientific and social past at the Cape. Professor Schrire is currently working on the archaeology and history of the Castle of Good Hope (1666-1850), and hopes to unravel the material objects that elucidate the life and times on an old, colonial African frontier.
 Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town, South Africa |
The infilled moat at the Castle of Good Hope, Cape Town, South Africa |
- Christien Philmarc Tompkins
- Assistant Professor, SAS
- Specialization: Race and racialization; critical theory, political economy; human capital, work, and labor; education and reform; design thinking; United States; New Orleans; cities and space; African Americans; whiteness; neoliberalism and privatization; expertise, technocracy, and experimentation; social engineering and capacity building; ideology and identity; infrastructure
- Degree and University: PhD, U Chicago, 2017
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. - Office: RAB-309
- Office Hours: Spring 2025: By appointment
- Phone: 848-932-4124
Christien Philmarc Tompkins is a cultural anthropologist broadly concerned with the critical ethnographic study of how technocratic interventions into inequality reproduce racialized governance in the United States. His current research shows how experimental education reforms in Post-Katrina New Orleans have created new terrains for the development of racializing forms of expertise, design thinking, labor, and entrepreneurialism. This work intervenes in critical debates on the nature of neoliberalism, development, and colonial sovereignty by demonstrating how New Orleans has become a simultaneously exemplary and exceptional site for racializing technologies and institutions. The city has long been held up as a site of experimentation with racial orders. Now, it is also positioned as an ideal locus for reflecting on reconstruction as a mode of governance, one which I argue is endemic to the Anthropocene as man-made political and economic crises continue to dovetail with natural disasters as seen in Houston and Puerto Rico.
Pieces of this work have been published in Souls, and will be comprehensively published in his forthcoming book, Reconstructing Race: New Orleans Education Reform as Experimental Labor, which has been selected by the University of California Press as a finalist in the new series, Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century (http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/30334/introducing-the-2017-atelier-finalists/). The book argues that in Post-Katrina New Orleans the unprecedented conversion of ninety percent of district schools into privately managed charter schools has served as a fertile site for debates over systemic interventions to alleviate racial and economic inequality. Reconstructing Race shows how, despite initial socio-political naiveté, reform-minded educators, non-profits, and entrepreneurs have developed sophisticated techniques of recognition, selective inclusion, and racialized expertise. Reconstructing Race finds that New Orleans’ citywide experimentation with private management as well as the work roles and laboring subjectivities of educators has led to the proliferation of new terrains of racialized governance, where educators, policymakers, and entrepreneurs reconfigure and mobilize race under emergent entrepreneurial and expert cultures.
Academic Positions
Assistant Professor, Rutgers University, Department of Anthropology, 2018-
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California Los Angeles, Department of African American Studies, 2016-18
Education
University of Chicago – Sociocultural Anthropology
Ph.D., 2017
M.A., 2012
Lehman College, City University of New York
M.S.Ed, Early Childhood Education, 2010