Debbora Battaglia

Professor of Anthropology

Specialization
Personhood; visual and material culture; gender; social memory and forgetting; spirituality; new religious networks; Melanesia

Debbora Battaglia is the author of On the Bones of the Serpent: Person, Memory, and Mortality in Sabarl Island Society (University of Chicago Press) and the editor of Rhetorics of Self-Making (University of California Press), and of E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces (in press, Duke University Press). She is currently working on Galaxies of Discourse: Toward an Anthropological Model of Visits. She has also published numerous scholarly articles, including, most recently, "Multiplicities: An Anthropologist's Thoughts on Replicants and Clones in Popular Films," in the journal Critical Inquiry, and "Toward an Ethics of the Open Subject: Writing Culture 'In Good Conscience'," in Henrietta Moore, ed. Anthropological Theory Today (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Professor Battaglia, who received her doctorate from Cambridge University in the field of social anthropology, teaches courses in cultural identities and differences, discourses of the sacred, visualizing culture, peoples of the South Pacific, and introductory anthropology.

She has conducted anthropological fieldwork in the islands off the New Guinea coast and urban fieldwork in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. She has also worked in Quebec Province, the East Coast of the U.S., and on the Internet with a new religious movement focusing on science as faith.

Her honors include the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

A frequent presenter and keynote speaker at national and international conferences and academic institutions, she has served as a member of the editorial board of American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Material Culture, and Anthropological Quarterly. She has also served on National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship panels and on Ph.D. external review committees.

In addition to teaching at Mount Holyoke, she has taught courses at the University of East Anglia and Stanford University.

News Links:

Extraterrestrials Land in Academia, The New York Sun, April 13, 2006