Core faculty

Michèle Dominy, Professor of Anthropology and Dean of the College

Michele Dominy began teaching at Bard in February 1981. She received her AB degree with honors from Bryn Mawr College and her MA and PhD from Cornell University. Professor Dominy's teaching interests are: the anthropology of place, feminist anthropology, interpretive anthropology, the anthropology of religion, and the ethnography of communication. Her research areas include land, culture and identity in settler societies, place attachment and sustainability in mountainlands, and empire and ecology. She has conducted long-term field research in the high country of New Zealand and Australia. Her recent publications include: "Hearing grass, thinking grass: postcolonialism and ecology in Aotearoa-New Zealand" in Disputed Territories: Land, Culture, and Identity in Settler Societies, edited by David Trigger and Gareth Griffiths; and "Anthropology in the "savage slot': reflections on the epistemology of knowledge" which appeared in a special issue of Anthropological Forum on Critical Ethnography in the Pacific, guest edited with Laurence Carucci. Author of Calling the Station Home: Place and Identity in New Zealand's High Country (2001), she has contributed articles and reviews to Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, New Zealand Women's Studies Journal, Pacific Studies, Anthropology Today, Gender and Society, Pacific Affairs, Landfall: A New Zealand Quarterly, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Forest and Conservation History, American Ethnologist, Anthropological Forum, Cultural Anthropology, Man, Landscape Review, Current Anthropology, Journal of Political Ecology, Ecumene, The Contemporary Pacific, and edited volumes and proceedings. She has received awards and grants from: Cornell University and the Center for International Studies; the National Science Foundation; the United States/New Zealand Council; the Wenner-Gren Foundation; the Cultural Heritage Conservation Research Centre at the University of Canberra; the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Bard Research Fund. She is an honorary life member of the American Anthropological Association and Fellow of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, the Royal Anthropological Association of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Most recently she has served on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist and on the board of the American Conference of Academic Deans. She is affiliated with the Gender Studies and Sexuality, and Environmental Studies programs.

Office: Ludlow 202
Phone: 845-758-7420
E-mail: dominy@bard.edu