Williams ANSO: Anthropology and Sociology

08/23/2023

Happy August 2023 everyone! After a long and honorable run of Fb, the ANSO Department is moving to Instagram, where you can find us at https://instagram.com/williams.anso
Be well and stay in touch!

03/10/2022

If you have been waiting to hear Prof. Su talk about her new book, wait no more! Join the Zoom conversation with her about The Border Within, followed up by a discussion of the book from Prof. Bloemraad of UC Berkeley, on Fri, March 11, at 3-4:30 EST. You can learn more and register here:

02/17/2022

Congratulatikns to Prof. Phi Hong Su on the publication of her book! From the publisher: “When the Berlin Wall fell, Germany united in a wave of euphoria and solidarity. Also caught in the current were Vietnamese border crossers who had left their homeland after its reunification in 1975. Unwilling to live under socialism, one group resettled in West Berlin as refugees. In the name of socialist solidarity, a second group arrived in East Berlin as contract workers. The Border Within paints a vivid portrait of these disparate Vietnamese migrants' encounters with each other in the post-socialist city of Berlin. Journalists, scholars, and Vietnamese border crossers themselves consider these groups that left their homes under vastly different conditions to be one people, linked by an unquestionable ethnic nationhood. Phi Hong Su's rigorous ethnography unpacks this intuition. In absorbing prose, Su reveals how these Cold War compatriots enact palpable social boundaries in everyday life. This book uncovers how 20th-century state formation and international migration—together, border crossings—generate enduring migrant classifications. In doing so, border crossings fracture shared ethnic, national, and religious identities in enduring ways.”

New from Stanford University Press: The Border Within: Vietnamese Migrants Transforming Ethnic Nationalism in Berlin by Phi Hong Su. About...

12/11/2021

Social Theory Mocktails? Yes, please! The department was happy to resume the tradition of ANSO student-faculty mixers, even if still masked. Special thanks to Prof. Lee for the mixology!

11/22/2021

Looking for a hands-on opportunity for Winter Study? Want to develop a critical perspective on the archive? Register for SOC16, The Lives of Infamous Men!

08/11/2021

Prof. Nolan's book Atomic Doctors is shaping the conversation on the nuclear age in just the way it was meant to. In the NY Times article on Charles Loeb, the Black reporter who exposed lies about the Atom Bomb, William J. Broad writes,

"James L. Nolan Jr., author of “Atomic Doctors,” said Colonel Warren was careful in his medical reports to downplay the ills. “Groves was his boss,” Mr. Nolan said in an interview. “He knew his audience.” The subtitle of Mr. Nolan’s book is “Conscience and Complicity.”

For more on Loeb's work, see the full article here:

Charles H. Loeb defied the American military’s denials and propaganda to show how deadly radiation from the strike on Hiroshima sickened and killed.

06/08/2021

Each year, our Department recognizes two graduating senior majors for their exemplary work in Anthropology and Sociology. This year, the recipients of the Robert Friedrichs and James Orton Awards are Nicole Chen and Andre Hui, pictured here with Prof. Antonia Foias. They are now off to, respectively, Washington, DC (Nicole) and Singapore, where Andre will be starting his term as the Assistant Archivist with the National Library Board of Singapore. Congratulations, Nicole and Andre! We are delighted to see that you are already climbing *both* high, and far!

04/16/2021

Exciting news: Professor Joel Lee's book, Deceptive Majority: Dalits, Hinduism, and Underground Religion is out with Cambridge University Press! It is not yet available through Amazon, but you can access the e-book copy through the Williams Library. Happy reading!

01/20/2021

Add this to the list of things you can do with an Anthropology and/or Sociology degree, folks! Amanda Gorman, Harvard Sociology ‘20

She is calling her inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb.”

09/01/2020

Prof. Nolan's Atomic Doctors is getting some great publicity from the New York Times:

"Usually histories of the nuclear project at Los Alamos, N.M., during World War II dwell on tensions between the military officers overseeing the project and the physicists doing the necessary research. In this striking study, James L. Nolan Jr. looks at the disquieting participation of members of a third profession, medicine…[a] powerful and readable book.”

Two new books look at World War II from the perspectives of outsiders on the fringes of conflict.

08/19/2020

Did you know that prof. Nolan recently published a book, Atomic Doctors, about the dawn of the nuclear age? Read the interview with prof. Nolan about this research, and his class Going Nuclear, in this interview on the ANSO website!

My name is Giebien Na, and I graduated Williams College in June 2020. I recently talked to Chair of Anthropology and Sociology and Washington Gladden Professor of Sociology James Nolan about a subject near to his heart that has been garnering national attention. Read our conversation below! Hi Profe...

07/23/2020

Attention ANSO majors!