Anthropological Scholar, Poet, Filmmaker Ruth Behar to Deliver Lecture January 10

A respected and provocative scholar of anthropology Ruth Behar will speak at the University of Georgia on Monday, January 10, 2005.

Behar is a professor at the University of Michigan who has gained recognition for her literary essays, poetry, fiction and new work as an emerging filmmaker in cultural anthropology. She is also affiliated with UM programs in women's studies, and Latina/Latino studies.

She will deliver a lecture titled, “Unceasing Search for Anthropology's Poetry,” at 4 p.m. in Room 148 of the Student Learning Center. It is free and open to the public.

Behar's lecture is sponsored by the UGA Center for the Humanities and Arts as part of the 18 th QUIG 2005 Conference on Interdisciplinary Qualitative Studies to be held at UGA January 7-9. The conference's theme is “Art as Research & Research as Art.”

Born in Havanna, Cuba, Behar came to live in New York with her family in 1962. After receiving her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Princeton University in 1983, Behar spent the next 20 years traveling often to Spain, Mexico, and Cuba, writing about her experiences of crossing cultural borders as a poet, essayist, fiction writer, editor, and ethnographer. She is now turning to documentary filmmaking to express her unique vision of the meaning of home in an age of travel and homesickness.

Behar received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" award in 1988. She has also been the recipient of many prestigious fellowships for her scholarly and artistic work including a John Simon Guggenheim award in 1995 and a Creative Artist Grant from the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs in 1998.

Behar's first book was The Presence of the Past in a Spanish Village: Santa María del Monte (Princeton, 1986; expanded paperback edition, 1991), the story of how a small village negotiated its relation to the past in the wake of social transformations that removed people from the land during the late Franco years.

Her second book, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Beacon Press, 1993), an account of her friendship with a Mexican street peddler, gained her national prominence. Translated Woman was named a Notable Book of the Year for 1993 by the New York Times. The book was adapted for the stage by PREGONES Theater, a Latino company based in New York , which has taken the production to university campuses as well as to The Painted Bride Theater in Philadelphia and to their own theater in the Bronx .

Behar's most recent book, The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart (Beacon Press, 1996), is a controversial and widely discussed collection of six personal essays that places the emotions of loss, mourning, and the search for home at the center of anthropology.

In the last 10 years, Behar has traveled to Cuba frequently, inspiring an outpouring of artistic work. A bilingual chapbook of her poems, Poemas que vuelven a Cuba/Poems Returned to Cuba (1995) was published in Matanzas, Cuba by Vigía, an editorial collective that produces handmade artisanal books in small editions. She recently completed a collection of prose poems, Everything I Kept/Todo lo que guardé, which explores the themes of loss and regret. This collection will soon be published in Cuba.

Her latest work as an ethnographer and storyteller of women's lives has led Behar to the novel. She is currently writing Nightgowns from Cuba, a work that combines fiction, autobiography, and anthropological and historical research to tell the story of her Jewish-Cuban family's journey from Europe to Cuba to the United States as seen through the eyes of the Afro-Cuban woman, still living on the island, who was her caretaker as a child.

While working to expand dialogue among Cubans, Behar also sought to bring scholarly attention to the creative writings of American women anthropologists. With feminist scholar Deborah Gordon, she co-edited Women Writing Culture (University of California Press, 1995), an anthology of creative and critical writings that has become a required book in discussions of the history of anthropology.

The theme of the QUIG conference resulted from the growing interest in mergers between social scientists and artists, adding dimensionality, complexity, and accessibility to their work. Increasingly both researchers and artists have explored the space where aesthetics and communication of social meaning overlap, documenting human life in ways that are both artistic and scientific.

UGA's College of Education offers a variety of programs and experiences in Qualitative Research Studies. Students interested in pursuing careers involving the study and teaching of qualitative research methodologies are invited to apply to our doctoral programs in the Research, Evaluation, Measurement and Statistics Program (REMS).

For more information on QUIG:
http://www.coe.uga.edu/quig/

For more information on Ruth Behar:
http://www.ruthbehar.com

Thursday, December 16, 2004
WRITER: Michael Childs, 706/542-5889, mchilds@coe.uga.edu
CONTACT: Melisa Cahnmann,706/583-8127, cahnmann@coe.uga.edu