Dr. Nancy Lutz
Title: Associate Professor
Phone: 650-2746
Email: nlutz@siue.edu
Office: Peck 1224
Degree: PhD UCB 1986
Teaching Philosophy:
I am highly committed to anthropological fieldwork, to hands-on research projects, and to personal engagement in teaching and learning. My courses and research tend to stress qualitative methodologies (participant-observation, open-ended and semi-structured interviews, reflexivity, and interpretation).
Research Background and Interests:
Growing up in California, I became very interested in California history, especially Spanish California. An au-pair summer in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, after I graduated from high school, sparked interests in Brazil as well, and more generally in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies.
As an anthropology undergraduate, I wanted to learn more about Southeast Asia (where the U.S. was fighting the Vietnam War), and I found a second passion in the study of SE Asia. My undergraduate honors thesis was on Thai etiquette and politeness, based on interviews with Thai students at the University of California, Berkeley. A course on Island SE Asia sparked an interest in Indonesia, and I chose eastern Indonesia, which as a former Portuguese colony, matched those interests as well, for my Ph.D. fieldwork in cultural and linguistic anthropology. My Ph.D. dissertation was on political language and bilingualism on the Indonesian island of Adonara. This work was followed by work in and on Timor Leste, another former Portuguese colony.
Since that time, I have continued my interests in both SE Asia and in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies. My teaching and research interests revolve around the intersections of language, politics, law and religion. Although I continue my interests in SE Asia, I have returned to my earlier interests in former Spanish and Portuguese colonies and in contemporary Latin America, and am currently interested in (the remains of) Liberation Theology in the age of Neoliberalism.
