Shannon A. Novak
Professor, Anthropology
Degree
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1999
Specialties
Materiality of the body, contemporary (bio)archaeology, ethnohistory, historiography, necropolitics, gender, North America
Courses
Anthropology 131: Introduction to
Biological Anthropology
Honors 360/Anthropology 300:
Necropolitics
Anthropology 400/600: Excavating
Bodies in the Archives
Anthropology 433/633: Human
Osteology
Anthropology
434/634: Anthropology of Death
Anthropology 436/636: Bioarchaeology
Anthropology 631: Method and Theory
in Biological Anthropology
Biography
As an anthropologist, I seek to
understand human bodies as living beings, material substances, and cultural
symbols. To do so involves examining variable tissues and traces that persist
across generations and geographies. My “fieldwork,” in turn, takes place at multiple
sites: from ethnographic gatherings to institutions and archives, along with laboratories
and archaeological excavations. The latter is where my technical training was initially
developed in bioarchaeology. Broadly framed, my research explores historical
memory, movement, and materiality; multiple ontologies of the body, and
necropolitics. In one form or another, my studies articulate with ruptures that
occurred in the nineteenth century, and whose resonances are experienced in the
present.
My most recent work stems from the movement
of indentured laborers from India to the Caribbean—British Guiana, in
particular—to replace enslaved Africans on sugar plantations following
emancipation. From distant colonies these workers brought traces of their
homeland, including plants and practices that would animate social and material
landscapes in new ways. This included subaltern healing practices associated
with the goddess Mariamman, better known by her Sanskrit name, Kali.
In the wake of plantations, these rural practices were revitalized in
independent Guyana and, in the past three decades, transplanted to North
American cities where thousands of Indo-Guyanese settled in the U.S. and Canada.
For the past four years, I have been conducting ethnographic research on the
outskirts of Toronto at the first Mariamman temple established there. I
introduce my work on transnational ritual ecologies in a forthcoming edited
volume, Embodying Diversity. My chapter, “Plot-life in Flower City,”
serves as the framework for a monograph that I am currently developing.
Not unrelated, though a congregation
of a different sort, is a previous project that is currently being synthesized.
The Spring Street Presbyterian Church in New York City was a site of worship
and social action in the first half of the nineteenth century. By gathering as
a mixed-raced congregation and promoting a radical abolitionist stance, the church
became a target during the 1834 race riots. Memories and materials associated
with this now defunct institution were inadvertently exposed during recent construction
in lower Manhattan. Excavation of the church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1840) recovered
mortuary artifacts and commingled skeletons of some 200 peoples. These remains offer
fascinating insights on a community who gathered in response to dramatic
social, economic, and ecological upheavals brought on by accelerating global economy.
Archival records and family histories are being integrated with the skeletal
findings to examine migration, disease, labor, and social identities in this
diverse group. Collaborations with historians and archaeologists, artists and filmmakers,
and geo- and biomolecular scientists, among others, are being integrated into
an edited volume.
The questions and concerns involved in
these current studies emerge from my earlier research on the American West. Here,
traces of the past continue to haunt landscapes and the living, destabilizing
and transforming identities in unexpected ways. My first book, House of
Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre (2008),
examines the murder of some 120 men, women, and children in 1857 by a local
militia in the Utah Territory. My analysis of skeletal remains from the
massacre site is integrated with archival records and oral histories to offer a
portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and
living bodies. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric research in both Utah and
Arkansas, drew my attention towards the living and questions regarding how the
victims’ bodies and biographies have been deployed in cultural politics over
some 150 years. These findings are elaborated in a series of journal articles
and edited volumes. My second book, An Archaeology of Desperation
(2011), is a co-edited volume that synthesizes the findings from excavations at
the Donner family encampment in the Sierra Nevada. Here, a contingent of
overland emigrants became snowbound during the winter of 1846-47 and had to
resort to cannibalism to survive. In this book, specialists weave together
lines of evidence from archaeology, history, ecology, and osteology to reflect
on human social behavior under extreme conditions. Both books received the
James Deetz Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology.
Publications
Books
2011 An Archaeology of Desperation:
Exploring the Donner Party's Alder Creek Camp, edited by Kelly J. Dixon,
Julie M. Schablistsky, and Shannon A. Novak. University of Oklahoma Press,
Norma
2008 House of Mourning: A
Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. University of Utah
Press, Salt Lake City
Edited Journal
2020 “Historical Bioarchaeology.” Invited thematic issue for Historical Archaeology 54(1), edited by Shannon A. Novak
Select Articles and
Chapters
In review Plot-life in Flower City:
Transnational Ritual Ecologies in the Wake of Plantations. In Embodying
Biodiversity: Sanctuaries in Charged Climates, edited by Terese Gagnon and
Virginia Nazarea. Tucson: University of Arizona Press
2020 Vital Data: Re/Introducing
Historical Bioarchaeology. Historical Archaeology 54(1):1-16
2020 Assembling Heads and
Circulating Tales: The Doings and Undoings of Specimen 2032. Historical
Archaeology 53(4):71-91. (with Alanna Warner-Smith)
2017 Corporeal Congregations and
Asynchronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street. American Anthropologist 119(2):236-252
2017 Talking Heads and Other
Specters of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. In Studies in Forensic
Biohistory: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Christopher
Stowjanowski and William N. Duncan, pp. 168-190. Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge
2017 On the Stories of Men and the
Substance of Women: Interrogating Gender Through Violence. In
Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology, edited by Sarbina C. Agarwal
and Julie K. Wesp, pp. 129-164. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque
2017 Partible Persons or Persons
Apart: Postmortem Interventions at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church,
Manhattan. In The Bioarchaeology of Dissection and Autopsy in the
United States, edited by Ken Nystrom, pp. 87-111. Springer, New York
2014 Leave Taking:
Materialities of Moving Over Land. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 24(3):1-9
2014 How to Say Things with
Bodies: Meaningful Violence on an American Frontier. In The
Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Human Conflict, edited by
Christopher Knüsel and Martin J. Smith, pp. 542-559. New York, Routledge
2006 Remembering Mountain
Meadows: Collective Violence and the Manipulation of Social Boundaries. Journal
of Anthropological Research, 62:1-25 (with Lars Rodseth)
2006 Remembering Mountain
Meadows: Collective Violence and the Manipulation of Social Boundaries. Journal
of Anthropological Research, 62:1-25 (with Lars Rodseth)
Research Grants and Awards
Research Grants
Appleby-Mosher Fund Award, Maxwell
School. “Courses and Cycles through a Guyanese Mariamaan Temple.” 2017, 2019
Faculty Fellowship Program in the
Syracuse University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center. Develop
course, “Excavating Bodies in the Archives.” May-June 2017
Office of Research Small Grant
Program, Syracuse University. “Geomapping Movement and Migration in Historic
New York City: A Stable Isotope Pilot Study.” 2015-17
Appleby-Mosher Fund Award, Maxwell
School. Spring Street Presbyterian Church Research. 2008, 2010, 2012
Summer Project Assistantship
Program, Maxwell School. Spring Street Presbyterian Church Research. 2009,
2011, 2014
National Institution of Justice,
“Continuing Professional Education Program in Forensic Anthropology by Syracuse
University.” 2009-11
Humanities and Social Science
Research Council, Idaho State University, “Networks of Memory: The Hidden
Histories of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.” 2004-6
American Fellow, American
Association of University Women Educational Foundation. Complete book
manuscript, House of Mourning. 2003-4
Awards
2018 Center for Fellowship and
Scholarship Advising “Mentor of the Year.” Syracuse University
2015 Excellence in Graduate
Education Faculty Recognition Award, Syracuse University
2013 Society for Historical
Archaeology James Deetz Award for: An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring
the Donner Party's Alder Creek Camp (2011, University of Oklahoma Press)
2010
Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award for Outstanding Research, Teaching, and
Service. Maxwell School, Syracuse University
2010 Society for Historical Archaeology James
Deetz Award for: House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain
Meadows Massacre (2008, University of Utah Press)