Lucia Volk
Associate Professor &
Co-director of SFSU's Middle East and Islamic Studies program
Ph.D., Harvard University, 2001
Office: HSS 129, Office Hours: W 12-2 & by appt.
Phone: (415) 405-2468, Email: lvolk@sfsu.edu
Cultural Anthropology, Nation-Building after Periods of Violence, Politics of Memory, Muslim-Christian Relations; Transnationalism and Diaspora; Immigrant Health, Health Equity, Social Inequality, Class; Community-based Participatory Research
My research and teaching interests currently cover three fields: I am interested in studying social and cultural processes by which societies transition from war time to peace time, in particular, I am interested in sites of commemoration of violent events. This work is based on research in Lebanon, where I have been conducting fieldwork since 1997. A separate but linked research interest follows the lives of Lebanese return migrants to Lebanon, and seeks to answer questions of "foreign" nationals in building a nation. Finally, I am interested in the lives of Arab and Muslim migrants in the United States, and have been working with the Arab Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco to conduct a Health Survey. In addition, I have been conducting interviews with Muslim women in San Francisco's Tenderloin about the challenges of migration.
Background
I came to SFSU in 2003 after a two-year appointment as Lecturer in Anthropology at Harvard University, where I received my doctoral degree (Dissertation: Missing the Nation: Lebanon's Post-War Generation in the Midst of Reconstruction). In the fall of 2007, I received a Presidential Award at San Francisco State University to complete my book manuscript No Victor, No Vanquished: The Politics of Memory in Lebanon, currently accepted for publication at Indiana University Press.
Projects
The Politics of Memory
The past matters greatly in constructions of meaning in the present. All states rely on invented traditions and origin stories in order to generate national identities. The problem is what to do with memories of violence, and in particular, memories of communal violence or civil war. In order to fashion a sense of shared community identity, states or state agents need to modify memories of civil war. Archeological heritage and public memorials are examples of sites that carry out the act of re-remembering. In Lebanon, I track the histories of building and rebuilding public memorials and the often failed or difficult attempts at fixing the meaning of the past.
Health Equity among Immigrant Populations
In collaboration with the Arab Cultural and Community Center in San Francisco, I have been conducting ethnographic interviews among Yemeni immgrants who live in the Tenderloin in order to learn about the challenges Muslim families, and in particular, Muslim women, face living their everyday lives in a post 9/11 and "war on terror" environment. Also with the ACCC, I worked on collecting and analyzing an extensive health survey, funded by the California Endowment (see link below). More articles are currently in progress to make more of the survey results available to a larger audience. I hope to submit a large research grant to a national funding institution in order to continue my Tenderloin work.
Most recent Publications
2010 No Victor, No Vanquished: The Politics of Memory in Modern Lebanon
(working title) Accepted for publication with Indiana University Press in spring 2010.
2009 “Kull wahad la haalu”: Feelings of Isolation and Distress among
Yemeni Immigrant Women in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 23(4): 397-416.
2009 "Crossing the East-West Divide: Lebanese Returnee Youth
Confront 'Eastern' Sectarianism and 'Western' Vice," Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review 8 (2009): 200-226.
2009 "Martyrs at the Margins: The Politics of Neglect in Lebanon's
Borderlands," Middle Eastern Studies 45(2): 263-282.
2009 Fighting Symbolic Battles at Nahr el-Kalb: The Politics of Public
Memory and the Making of Modern Lebanon, Bulletin d'Archéologie et d'Architecture Libanaises Special Issue V: 327-344.
2008 Living Healthier Lives in Diaspora: Results from a Health Survey of
the Bay Areas Arab and Arab-American Community. Co authored with Sally al-Daher and John D. Rogers. Health Survey Report to the California Endowment. San Francisco: Arab Cultural and Community Center. On the web at http://www.arabculturalcenter.org/arabhealth_surveyreport.pdf.
2008 When Memory Repeats Itself: The Politics of Heritage in Post-Civil
War Lebanon, International Journal of Middle East Studies 40(2): 291-314.
2007 Re-Remembering the Dead: A Genealogy of a Martyrs Memorial in
South Lebanon. Arab Studies Journal 15(1): 44-69.
Courses taught at SFSU
ANTH 120: Introduction to Social Anthropology
ANTH 319: Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa
ANTH 321: Endangered Cultures
ANTH 325: Class: A Cross-Cultural Comparison
ANTH 552: Anthropology of Social Memory
ANTH 555: Urban Anthropology
ANTH 651: Ethnographic Field Methods
ANTH 680: Seminar in Contemporary Anthropology
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