Joy Sather-Wagstaff, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Anthropology
email: Joy.Sather-Wagstaff@ndsu.edu
Office: 102D Putnam Hall
Phone: 701.231.6498
Degrees:
- Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2007
- B.S., Gender Studies, University of Utah, 2000
- B.A., Anthropology, University of Utah, 2000
Dr. Sather-Wagstaff, a cultural anthropologist, has been a member of the anthropology faculty since 2007. Her research centers on memorial museums and commemorative landscapes as educational sites and institutions for social conscience, change, and justice. Dr. Sather-Wagstaff’s past research was an ethnographic investigation and analysis of the relationship between tourism, tourists, and processes of informal and formal memorialization at the former site of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Oklahoma City National Memorial in Oklahoma City.
Dr. Sather-Wagstaff is currently engaged in a collaborative research project with Dr. Rebekah Sobel, Program Evaluator, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) at the museum. Dr. Sather-Wagstaff and Dr. Sobel are assessing museum patrons' visit and post-visit experiences regarding a new interactive exhibit in the museum and online: www.ushmm.org/genocide/take_action/. The installation, From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide Today, asks visitors to use the context of the Holocaust and three case studies in Darfur, Rwanda, and Bosnia to take action against hate and genocide through a focus on the recent genocide, ongoing conflicts, and conflict resolution.
Selected publications:
2009. Folk Epigraphy as Intangible Heritage at the World Trade Center, Oklahoma City and Beyond. In Intangible Heritage Embodied, D. Fairchild Ruggles and Helaine Silverman, eds. pp. 179-194. New York: Springer.
2008. Picturing Experience: A Tourist-centred Perspective on Commemorative Historical Sites. Tourist Studies: An International Journal 8(1):77-103.
Research and teaching specializations:
The anthropology of tourism, museums, and global and local heritage/historical sites; disaster, violence and genocide studies; the anthropology of space and place; memory and historicity; consumption and commodification; public history methods and theory: visual anthropology; sociolinguistics and anthroposemiotics; contemporary visual and material culture; vernacular photography and souvenirs; cultures of collecting; landscape and built environment history; death and mourning; gender/ethnicity/race/class inequality; social justice movements; teaching with technology; social media and public interest anthropology; Geographical regions of specialization: United States, Caribbean, South and Central America
Applied research opportunities for undergraduates:
Dr. Sather-Wagstaff is a faculty mentor for the McNair Scholars Program.
Courses:
- Anthropology 111 Introduction to Anthropology
- Anthropology 206 Peoples of the World
- Anthropology 450/650 Qualitative Methods in Cultural Anthropology
- Anthropology/Sociology 441/641 Death and Dying
- Anthropology/Emergency Management 464/664 Disaster and Culture
- Anthropology 491/690 Seminar in Language & Expressive Culture
- Anthropology 498 Senior Capstone
