October 7, 2024
On Monday, the Anthropology Department welcomes two new faculty members, Dan Mains and Amanda Minks. They are both sociocultural anthropologists and Full Professors. They have been in the Honors College and all of the Honors College faculty are having their appointments moved to the Dodge Family College of Arts and Sciences. Moving forward, their teaching and service responsibility will be split between Honors and Anthropology. We are excited to have them join the Department!
Amanda Minks is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist whose research has focused on the social and aesthetic practices of communication across cultures. Dr. Minks conducted long-term ethnographic and linguistic anthropological research for her first book, Voices of Play: Miskitu Children's Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (University of Arizona Press, 2013) to show how Indigenous children used creative forms, multilingualism, and media to stake claims of belonging in a multiethnic community on the fringes of the nation-state. Dr. Minks' second book, entitled Indigenous Audibilities: Music, Heritage, and Collections in the Americas, is based on archival research in the U.S., Mexico, Nicaragua, and Chile (Oxford University Press, 2024). This book presents a social-historical method of listening, reading, and thinking beyond the referentiality of archived texts, and in the process uncovers neglected genealogies of cultural music research.
Daniel Mains' research explores the intersection between culture and economics in urban Africa. Dr. Mains teaches courses on international development, globalization, migration, capitalism, consumer cultures, and Africa. He has a forthcoming book on the politics of water infrastructure in Norman. His two prior books are Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia (Duke University Press, 2019) and Hope is Cut: Youth, Unemployment, and the Future in Urban Ethiopia (Temple University Press, 2011) which example urbanization and globalization in Ethiopia.
