People
Do More with Asian Studies! Our Affiliated Faculty can help you inside and outside the classroom.
AFFILIATED FACULTY
Koji Arizumi, Japanese program
DMA The University of Alabama
The Director of the Critical Languages Center, Dr. Arizumi teaches in the Japanese program. His areas of interest include Japanese language, literature, and film.
Nikhil Bilwakesh, Dept. of English
Ph.D. City University of New York,
Asian American literature
As an Assistant Professor, Dr. Bilwakesh holds a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His academic interests include nineteenth-century American literature, Asian American literature, film studies, and the essay. He is currently working on a book about pre-Civil War American cosmopolitanism.
Elizabeth Cooper, Dept. of Anthropology
MPH, Ph.D. University of South Florida
Dr. Cooper is an applied medical anthropologist with an area specialization in non-peninsular Malaysia, particularly Sarawak state. Her research interests include nutritional anthropology – food beliefs and feeding ideals, food security, and hunger and household coping strategies – the anthropology of policy, and cognitive, visual, and participatory methodologies. Funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Fulbright Fellowship, and Sigma Xi Scientific Research Society, Dr. Cooper’s work combines historical inquiry with in-depth, ethnographic research to assess the ways in which common, local foods are perceived and categorized and the degree to which these understandings are shared across stakeholder groups. Dr. Cooper is an Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department, where she teaches courses on Applied Nutritional Anthropology, Sociocultural Theory, Southeast Asia, Ethnographic Methods, and the Anthropology of Food.
Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Dept. of History
Ph.D. Australian National University
As an Assistant Professor, Dr. Holmes-Tagchungdarpa’s interests include Tibet, the Himalayan regions, and China.
Simanti Lahiri, Dept. of Political Science
Ph.D. University of Wisconsin Madison
As an Assistant Professor, Dr. Lahiri focuses her teaching and research on South Asian politics, particularly on issues related to conflict and violence.
Cathy Pagani, Dept. of Art and Art History
Ph.D. University of Toronto
Chinese Art
Dr. Pagani came to The University of Alabama from Canada in 1993. She is a prolific scholar of Asian Art whose research can be found in over 35 articles and has been the topic of several publications. She is the author of Eastern Magnificence and European Ingenuity: Clocks of Late Imperial China, Chinese Opium Boxes and The First Emperor of China co-authored with R.W.L. Guisso. In conjunction with her scholarship Dr. Pagani is a widely sought-after lecturer who has presented her research on countless occasions at nationally and internationally respected colleges, universities and professional organizations.
Steven Ramey, Dept. of Religious Studies
Ph.D. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Contemporary religions of India
Dr. Ramey’s primary research focuses on the contemporary formation of religious practices in contexts of migration, particularly analyzing the contestations surrounding subgroups within a religion. He is continuing extensive research with people from the region of Sindh who assert a clear Hindu identification but whose practices, which incorporate Hindu deities and texts, the Guru Granth Sahib of Sikhism, and Sufi Muslim saints, lead others to question the Hindu identification of the Sindhis. He is also researching South Asian religions in the southeastern United States, especially focusing on Indo-Caribbean Hindus and Sindhi Hindus in this context. He uses the case of the Sindhi Hindus, Indo-Caribbean Hindus, and other subgroups to analyze the ways religious boundaries are constructed and contested in both academic studies and contemporary societies and the impact of those processes on minority groups.
Matthew Wolgram, Dept. of Anthropology
Ph.D. University of Michigan
Linguistic and medical anthropology in Kerala, India
Matthew Wolfgram is a linguistic and medical anthropologist, and his primary research is on the modernization of a South Asian medical system called Ayurveda. In particular, his research addresses the important role of linguistic practices such as translation and classroom and clinical talk in the historic and contemporary rationalization and scientific enhancement of the tradition in Kerala, South India. His second research project is on the role of teacher-student interaction in the socialization of scientific and mathematical ontologies and social class dispositions in the context of U.S. public schooling. The overarching goal of Dr. Wolfgram’s research program is to document and theorize the large-scale historical and social consequences of situated forms of institutional language, social interaction, and text production.