Public Talks

A select list of public talks:

How Identity Politics has Morphed into Antisemitism on Campus (with Gail Dines), Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, January 2017.

Jewish Dress and Cultural History: What You Can Learn from Grandma’s Photos. Jewish Genealogical Society of Greater Boston, December, 2016.

Everyday Life in Papua, New Guinea Today; Or Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Secret to Money and Affluence. Framingham Public Library, Lifelong Lecture Series, October 2013.

Art and the Meaning of Life in the Sepik River. Friends of African and Oceanic Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2012.

Presentation of fieldwork project on “Moni, Marginality, and Modernization in Postcolonial Papua New Guinea,” Annual Conference for Funded Research, Institute for Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion, University of California, Irvine, 2010.

“Jewcy!: Clothing, Gender, and the Rethinking of American Jewish Identity,”  Virginia Tech University, 2009.

Invited participant/discussant, “Gender, Religion, and Identity in Social Theory” seminar, Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought, Virginia Tech University, 2009.

Participant, Winter Policy Talk, Wheelock College, “The Changing Face of American: What Do We Know About Immigrant Children and Families?,” 2009.

Moderator and Discussant, “(Un)Dressing Religion, Clothing and Identity,” Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, 2008.

Picturing the Future: Children’s Drawings from Papua New Guinea. Human Development Brown Bag Lunch Series, 2008.

Respondent, Feminist Conversations about the Jewish Rite of Circumcision, Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, 2007.

Dress, Diaspora, Discontent: Anthropological Reflections on Clothing and Contemporary Jewish Identity. Colloquium, Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University, 2006.

Psychoanalyzing Phallacies: Freud and Current Circumcision Controversies. New York Public Library, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Dorot Jewish Division. Program on Freud’s Foreskin: A Sesquicentennial Celebration of the Most Suggestive Circumcision in History, 2006.

Sepik River Art: Representing the Flow of Human Life and the Cosmos. South Dakota Art Museum, South Dakota State University, 2001.

Ritual, Religion and Art in the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea. Lecture at the opening of the “Art of the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea” exhibit, DePauw University Anthropology Museum, 1999.

Sorcery, Cosmology and Illness in the Sepik River, Papua New Guinea. Religion and Healing lecture series, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Butler University, Indianapolis, 1995.

Towards an Aesthetics of Gender: The Meaning of Shell Decoration in Iatmul Culture (Sepik River, Papua New Guinea). Bishop Museum, Honolulu, HI, 1994.