Shannon A. Novak
Professor, Anthropology
Degree
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1999
Specialties
Bioarchaeology, ethnohistory, gender, political violence, materiality of the body, North America
Courses
Anthropology 131: Introduction to
Biological Anthropology
Honors 360/Anthropology 300:
Necropolitics
Anthropology 400/600:
Seminar—Materiality
Anthropology 400/600:
Seminar—Reading the Body
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 a biocultural anthropologist, I
seek to understand human bodies as living organisms, cultural symbols, and
material substances. More specifically, my research interests include political
and gender violence; historical memory, movement, and materiality; and multiple
ontologies of the body.
Such interests developed during my
studies of two infamous events in nineteenth-century America: the Mountain
Meadows massacre and the ordeal of the Donner Party. 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. Having completed a decade of ethnographic and ethnohistoric
research in both Utah and Arkansas, my attention turned to the living and how
the victims’ bodies and biographies have been deployed in cultural politics
over some 150 years. 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.
A more recent bioarchaeology project explores a different kind of American
frontier, that of an urbanizing metropolis. Along with my students, I completed
the analysis of some 200 individuals from burial vaults associated with the
Spring Street Presbyterian Church in Lower Manhattan (ca. 1820-1850). The
church housed a multi-racial congregation of radical abolitionists, whose
controversial practices became the focus of race riots in 1834. The remains of
people interred there provide a fascinating view of a community who gathered in
response to dramatic social, economic, and ecological changes brought on by commercialization
and early industrialization. Archival records and family histories are being
used to complement the skeletal findings and to provide insights on migration,
disease, labor, and social identities in this diverse group. Stable isotope
analyses are being conducted by my colleagues, Dr. Joan Coltrain and Dr. Diego
Fernandez at the University of Utah, and together we initiated a geomapping
project using faunal remains from archaeological sites in New York City and
surrounding areas.
I
recently initiated a new project that might be characterized as the “bioarchaeology
of the contemporary,” an attempt to understand bodily experience in the present
using an archaeological approach. My case involves the materiality and movement
of women’s bodies, broadly conceived, in and through a Guyanese Hindu temple in
Toronto. Here they practice Kali Mai worship, a religious tradition that
traveled to Guyana with South Asian indentured servants who were imported by
the British to work on sugar plantations. Kali worship is known for its ritual
displays and performances (including spirit possession), and the special
attention it pays to the bodies of women and other feminine forms. Over the
past three decades, the tradition has been transplanted to North America, as
many thousands of Guyanese have settled in Canada and the United States. Entangled
in this tradition are wider global flows of peoples, commodities, and
practices, many of which provide vital substances for sustaining Kali worship
far from home. While exploring health and well-being across the life course, I will
investigate the gendered aspects of ritual and the ways these enter into activities
beyond the temple. To do so will involve following the movements and
transformations of multiple beings, substances, and other tangible forms.
Publications
BOOKS
2008 House
of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City
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, Norman
SELECT ARTICLES
& CHAPTERS
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
2011 [Wo]man and Beast: Skeletal
Signatures of a Starvation Diet. In An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring
the Donner Party's Alder Creek Camp, edited by Kelly J. Dixon, Julie M.
Schablitsky, and Shannon A. Novak, pp. 185-218. University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman
2011 The Signature of
Starvation: A Comparison of Bone Processing at a Chinese Encampment in Montana
and the Donner Party Camp in California. Historical Archaeology
45(2):97-112. (with Meredith A. B. Ellis, Christopher W. Merritt, and Kelly J.
Dixon)
2010 “Men, Women, and Children
Starving”: Archaeology of the Donner Family Camp. American Antiquity
75(3):627-656. (with Kelly J. Dixon, Gwen Robbins, Julie M. Schablitsky, G.
Richard Scott, and Guy L. Tasa)
2010 Resurrectionists'
Excursions: Evidence of Postmortem Dissection from the Spring Street
Presbyterian Church. Northeast Historical Archaeology, Volume
39:134-152. (with Wesley Willoughby)
2010 Archaeologies of Disease and
Public Order in Nineteenth-Century New York: The View from Spring Street.
Northeast Historical Archaeology, Volume 39: 86-108. (with William
Werner)
2009 The Political Significance of
Gender Violence. In Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary
Perspective on Male Aggression Against Females, edited by Martin N. Muller
and Richard W. Wrangham, pp. 292-321. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(with Lars Rodseth)
2009 [2006] Beneath the Façade:
A Skeletal Model of Domestic Violence. In The Social Archaeology of Human
Remains, edited by Rebecca Gowland and Christopher Knüsel, pp. 238-252,
second edition. Oxbow Press, Oxford.
2007 [2001] Battle Related
Trauma. In Blood Red Roses: The Archaeology of a Mass Grave from the Battle
of Towton AD 1461, second revised edition, edited by Veronica Fiorato,
Anthea Boylston and Christopher Knüsel, pp. 90-102. Oxbow Press, Oxford
2006 Remembering Mountain
Meadows: Collective Violence and the Manipulation of Social Boundaries. Journal
of Anthropological Research, 62:1-25. (with Lars Rodseth)
2006 The Impact of Primatology
on the Study of Human Society. In Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for
Social Scientists, edited by Jerome H. Barkow, pp. 187-220. Oxford
University Press, New York. (with Lars Rodseth)
2003 To Feed a Tree in Zion: Osteological
Analysis of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. Historical Archaeology
37(2):85-108. (with Derinna Kopp)
Research Grants and Awards
Research Grants
Appleby-Mosher Fund Award, Maxwell School. “Women’s Courses and Cycles through a Guyanese Mariamaan Temple.” 20017-18
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
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)