Department Announcements & Events

The department is pleased to announce that it has been joined by Arafaat A. Valiani, Assistant Professor of Sociology, and Nicole Castor, Gaius Charles Bolin Predoctoral Fellow for the new academic year.

Prof. Valiani's research interests include popular militancy, space and place, and the cultural politics of South Asia. His current project investigates the cultural, organizational, and historical dynamics of violence among Hindu nationalists in India.

Nicole Castor, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Chicago, studies the cultural production of identity in public space through festival and ritual events. Her dissertation research focuses on Orisha public rituals, Emancipation celebrations, and Carnival fetes in Trinidad as sites for the negotiation of contested race and class identities.