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Faculty

Chair

Joseph Rouse

Hedding Professor of Moral ScienceShow Bio and Photo

Faculty

Paul Erickson

Assistant Professor of HistoryShow Bio and Photo

Anna Geltzer

Visiting Assistant Professor of Science in SocietyShow Bio

Gillian Goslinga

Assistant Professor of AnthropologyShow Bio and Photo

Assistant Professor of Anthropology
222 Church Street 117
860-685-2454

Assistant Professor, Science in Society
222 Church Street 114
860-685-2454

Affiliated Faculty in Environmental Studies Program

ggoslinga@wesleyan.edu

BA Smith College
MA University Southern Calif
PHD University Calif Santa Crz

Fall 2013

ENVS419 - 02
Student Forum

Spring 2014

ENVS305 - 01
Moral Ecologies

Office Hours:

Allbritton 116-117, Wednesdays 4 -5:30 pm and by appointment.

Research Interests:

My driving research interest is ontological politics in zones of encounter between religion and science, indigenous healing systems and biomedicine, and anthropology and its others. I am especially interested in social phenomena that destabilize modern empirical categories of thought, analysis, and experience. For example: gestational surrogacy (mothers who are not mothers), spirit possession and religious healing (bodies that are multiply inhabited), agential nature (for example mountains that "hear" humans) and virgin births (conceptions that are not biological sex). My earlier work concerned epistemologies of embodiment in a U.S. gestational surrogacy arrangement. My current book project, Virgin Birth in South India: Ontology in the Borderlands of Old and New Reproductive Technologies, experiments with how to interpret the virgin birth claims of the women devotees of a South India god who has the paradoxical reputation of causing and curing infertility both. Considered alongside the arrival of the "new" reproductive technologies in Tamil Nadu and quickly came to code the modernity of the region, I argue that to encounter these virgin birth claims on their own terms, interpretation must be disengaged from the legacies of 19th century social thought in which the social and the biological came together in a ferociously positivist and colonialist political project that leaves little to no room for thinking about the facts of life outside of it. My future research will consider the ontological politics of agential nature, that is, claims that nature, like the South India god Paandi, empirically "responds" to humans.

Scholarly Keywords:

Critical medical anthropology, philosophical anthropology, feminist science studies, political ontology, materiality and embodiment, nature-culture debates, reproductive technolgies, incommensurable religious phenomena, visual anthropology, feminist and experimental ethnography.

Academic Associations:

American Anthropological Association Society for Feminist Anthropology Society for the Anthropology of Religion Society for Visual Anthropology Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness

Grants:

Wesleyan hiring grant (2009-2012), American Institute of Indian Studies Junior Fellowship (2007-2008) Social Science Research Council IDFR (2000-2002) UC Regents Writing and Research grants (1996-2005)

William Johnston

Professor of HistoryShow Bio and Photo

Jill Morawski

Professor of PsychologyShow Bio

Laura Stark

Assistant Professor of SociologyShow Bio and Photo

Jennifer Tucker

Associate Professor of HistoryShow Bio and Photo