See also: my current CV.

It seems to me that anthropologists have never produced a very good analysis of the university as a social institution, nor do they have much influence in the workings of universities as they currently exist. In my more cheerful moments, I hope to address both these problems. I'm currently working on my dissertation research proposal, which proposes an ethnographic study of the department of philosophy at the University of Paris-8. I'm interested in doing research in France because it seems to offer a good contrast to higher education in the United States - it has, first of all, a centralized, national system of public universities, but also a different organization of research and teaching, a different public role for "intellectuals," and a different history of the relation between academia and society.

I got interested in this topic through my BA thesis, which was an ethnographic study of literary theory classrooms at Cornell University. These classrooms were remarkable for their focus on French "theory," especially post-structuralist philosophy, and so it seems natural to look at France as the mythical origin of this sanctified body of theoretical texts. And besides texts, there's a lot to look at in academic life: I'm especially interested in social relations and semiotics of knowledge. This tends to shade over into a study of politics and collective action, of bureaucratic structure, social belonging and exclusion, microsocial interaction and macrocontext. I'm also getting increasingly interested in dialectical approaches to social theory - pretty abstract, I know.

Sometimes I also think it's too easy to reduce universities to rather stale bureaucratic conceptions, to a boring metanarrative about the state and capital, for instance. So part of the project has to be to confront the gothic element of academic life, its moments of dejection and rejection and abjection, its fantastic, romantic qualities, its dynamics of lunacy and wasted effort, its moments of ignorance and forgetting. The academic world has structures of chaos as well as structures of order; it enchants as much as it disenchants; it's not only about the play of socioeconomic structure, but about the dramatic, poetic, affective play of everyday life. If anthropology has anything to bring to research on universities, it's a recognition of the rich cultural dimension of the academic world, so often overlooked by other social scientists.