Dornsife-EHESS Partnership

Professor Frédéric Keck of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales will be the 2022–23 Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor at USC, in residence starting March 2023. Frédéric Keck is Professor (directeur de recherche) at the CNRS, affiliated with the Laboratoire D’anthropologie Sociale at the EHESS. Keck studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published on the history of French anthropology in its relations with philosophy, particularly Comte, Lévy-Bruhl, Durkheim, Bergson, and Lévi-Strauss.

Keck’s work sits at the crossroads of the history of science, the sociology of risk, and the anthropology of nature, with particular interests in standards of “biosecurity” applied to humans and animals and to the forms of anticipation they produce with regard to health and ecological disasters. After joining the CNRS in 2005, Keck carried out ethnographic surveys on health crises linked to animal diseases: BSE, SARS, “avian” and “swine” flu.  He was a laureate of the Fyssen Foundation in 2007, a CNRS bronze medalist in 2011, a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in 2015, and served as head of the research and teaching department of the musée du quai Branly (2014-2018) and director of the Social Anthropology Laboratory (2019-2020).

Professor Keck is being hosted by the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, which has organized the following programs as part of the visit:

• “The Visual Culture of Microbes”
  Thursday, March 30, 12:30-1:45 pm
  Public event co-sponsored by the Visual Studies Research Institute.
• “Rumors of Biosecurity: from the Pandemic in China to the War in Ukraine”
  Monday, April 10, 12:00-1:30 pm
  Public lecture co-sponsored by the USC Anthropology Department.

Janet Hoskins, Professor of Anthropology and Religion in USC Dornsife, is the 2022–23 Dornsife-EHESS professeur invité at the EHESS. Hoskins’s research interests are defined around several overlapping themes, each of which draws on a separate set of interdisciplinary connections: (1) indigenous representations of the past and of time, (2) the relation between gender, exchange and narrative, (3) colonial and postcolonial theory, with specific reference to Caodaism, a new universal religion born in French Indochina in 1926, and (4) migration and religious experience in Transpacific diasporic communities.

Her first book, The Play of Time: Kodi Perspectives on Calendars, History and Exchange (winner of the 1996 Benda Prize in Southeast Asian Studies, awarded by the Association for Asian Studies) was both an ethnographic study of the politics of time in an Eastern Indonesian society and a theoretical argument about alternate temporalities in the modern world. Based on more than three years of fieldwork with the Kodi people of Sumba, it examined indigenous calendars, historical narratives and new symbols of nationalist unity to show how a complex ancestral heritage has been changed in the contemporary context. Her second book, Headhunting and the Social Imagination in Southeast Asia (1996), continued this interest in history and anthropology by examining the reasons why headhunting rituals are still performed in the postcolonial era, several generations after pacification. These new instances suggest that headhunting is a powerful symbolic trope that resonates throughout the region, pitting a heritage of violent raids against new anxieties about domination by external political forces. Her third book, Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives (1998) explores the relationship between persons and their possessions, and in particular the ways in which both men and women may choose to tell their own life histories by using a domestic object as a pivot for narrative articulation. It draws on the fields of gender studies, cultural studies, literary analysis and exchange theory, and opposes forms of biographic identification to the different forms of materialism in Western consumerism. Her fourth book, The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Syncretism Becomes Transpacific Caodaism, looks at the changing historical contexts of a new millenarian religion that articulated an Asian synthesis of world religions in the context of anti-colonial resistance, the American war in Vietnam, and the post 1975 diaspora. She has also edited, with Viet Thanh Nguyen, the 2014 book Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field, and has edited, with Thien-Huong Ninh, a special issue of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies on Globalizing Vietnamese Religion in 2017. Her most recent research, conducted with Vietnamese anthropologist Nguyen Thi Hien, is about “Little Hanois and Little Saigons: Overseas Vietnamese Communities and Cold War Polarities”, and has included field studies of communities in Paris, Berlin, Prague and Moscow.

She is the co-founder (with Viet Thanh Nguyen) of the Center for Transpacific Studies, and was elected President of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (a section of the American Anthropological Association) from 2011-2013. She has been a scholar in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford, the Kyoto Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the Getty Research Institute, the National University of Singapore and the University of Oslo, Norway.

Professor Nancy L. Green of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales will be the inaugural Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor at USC, in residence February 1-28, 2022. Nancy L. Green is professor (directrice d’études) emerita of history at the EHESS. She received her doctorate from the University of Chicago and a doctorat d’état from the Université de Paris VII. A scholar of migration history, comparative methods, and French and American social history, her recent major publications include Citizenship and Those Who Leave (co-ed. with François Weil); The Other Americans in Paris: Businessmen, Countesses, Wayward Youth, 1880-1941; A Century of Transnationalism: Immigrants and Their Homeland Connections (co-ed. with Roger Waldinger); and The Limits of Transnationalism.

• February 7, 2022, 1:00-2:30pm: “Gender and Migration: History and historiography,” History Workshop
• February 9, 2022, 12:00-1:00pm: Roundtable on The Limits of Transnationalism, Center for Law, History and Culture
• February 25, 2022, 12:00-1:30pm: “Transnationalism and Walls: History and Limits,” UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration”
• Late February 2022, Master class for graduate students and juniors scholars, “Doing History in a time of uncertainty”

Professor Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology in USC Dornsife, will be the inaugural Dornsife-EHESS professeur invité at the EHESS. She will be in residence in Paris in May 2022. Hondagneu-Sotelo is a qualitative sociologist who relies on interviews and ethnography, Los Angeles and Southern California have provided a rich social setting for developing a research trajectory spanning four areas:  Gender and migration; informal sector work in the immigrant city; religion and immigrant integration; and Latina/o sociology.  She has published ten books and over fifty journal articles and book chapters on these topics.  Her most recent book, co-authored with Manuel Pastor, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and American Studies & Ethnicity at USC, is South Central Dreams: Finding Home and Building Community in South L.A. (2021).