Library Calendar

Join the Far Away Places 2015-16 Speaker Series on March 31, at 7:00pm at Barnes & Noble, for a free, swipeable event.

Diane is an Anthropologist whose main interests include kinship, gender, the state, migration and religion, all very hot topics these days.  She received her BA from Westmont College in Montecito, California in 1988, an MA from San Diego State University in 1992 and her PhD in Anthropology from Washington State University in Pullman in 2000.

Before joining the Anthropology faculty at the University of Kentucky in 2007 she taught at American University of Beirut from 2000-2006. She’s the recipient of fellowships from the Hewlett Foundation at the University of San Diego in 2004, the Howard Foundation at Washington State University in 2006-07 and in 2013-14 was a fellow at the Center for Historical Research at Ohio State University.

She’s one of the few anthropologists to do participant observation research in Kurdistan, the ethnic homeland of the Kurds encompassing parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria.  She has conducted field research in the Kurdistan region of Iraq continuously since 1995 and returned there again this winter.

Her first book Middle Eastern Belongings was published in 2010 and explores belonging to and in Middle Eastern settings.  Her newest book Kurdistan on the Global Stage: Kinship, Land and Community in Iraq was published by Rutgers University Press in 2014.  She’s one of the very few scholars to have conducted research in Iraq under extremely difficult conditions during the Saddam Hussein regime.

She’ll be talking about household life in Kurdistan’s towns and villages and the current situation on the ground in today’s Iraq.  She’ll sign copies of her book following her presentation.