Agrarian Studies Fellows 2016-2017
Program Fellows 2016-17
Anthony Acciavatti (History, Princeton)
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow
Anthony Acciavatti is a historian of science and technology with training in architecture and cartography. His first book, Ganges Water Machine: Designing New India’s Ancient River (awarded the 2016 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize), is a dynamic atlas of the Ganges River basin—the first such comprehensive atlas in half a century—based on a decade of fieldwork and archival research begun as a Fulbright Fellow in 2005. His account of irrigation, geography, population, and climate is the basis of a traveling exhibition that has appeared in museums and biennials in Asia, Europe, and the Americas. His dissertation, titled Schools to Satellites: Enlightening and Entertaining Village India, examines a group of scientists and engineers working with artists and designers to develop pedagogy for villagers during the Cold War. Anthony will use his time as a fellow to turn his dissertation into a manuscript as well as develop an exhibition of the films and objects he studies. He is a co-founder and editor of Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism.
Sabine Cadeau (History, University of Chicago)
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow
Sabine Cadeau received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 2015. Her manuscript in progress is titled Natives of the Border: Ethnic Haitians and the Law in the Dominican Republic, 1920-1961. It traces transformations in state policy and citizenship rights in rural communities along the Haitian-Dominican border before and after the 1937 Haitian Massacre. Her manuscript closely examines the lives of rural farmers on both sides of the border during the early and mid-twentieth century. Cadeau’s work identifies patterns of social conflict through studying arrests of rural people, smuggling, livestock theft, and unauthorized farming. As an agrarian studies fellow she will complete her book manuscript, which seeks to draw further scholarly attention to the 1937 Haitian Massacre and the ethnic Haitian experience in the Dominican Republic before and after the state sponsored violence of 1937.
Ian Matthew Miller (History and East Asian Languages, Harvard)
Agrarian Studies Program Fellow
Ian Matthew Miller holds a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University, and is an assistant professor of history at St. John’s University. His dissertation, Roots and Branches: Woodland Institutions in South China, 800-1600 describes the decline of state forestry and the rise of woodland control by lineages - clan organizations based around the veneration of shared ancestors. As an Agrarian Studies fellow he will continue to explore conflicts over wood resources and the the development of private institutions for production forestry and woodland conservation in early modern China. In particular he will research the role that graves played as focal points in conflicts over the woodland environment, and the impact of changing tax policies on the markets for wood and timber.
Affiliate Fellow 2016-17
Joy Pachuau (Anthropology, Oxford)
Affiliate Fellow
Dr. Joy L.K. Pachuau is Professor at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi. Her area of research interest includes the history of Christianity in India and the socio-cultural history of Northeast India. Dr. Pachuau is currently at the Macmillan Centre on a Fulbright-Nehru Academic Excellence Fellowship and will be researching on the connected histories between India’s Northeast and Southeast Asia. Her recent published works include Being Mizo (OUP 2014), The Camera as Witness (with Willem van Schendel, CUP 2015) and Christianity in Indian History (eds. with Tanika Sarkar and P. Malekandathil, Primus 2016).