Department of
Anthropology
Department of Anthropology
Old Main 330, University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Phone: (479) 575-2508; Fax: (479) 575-6595
E-mail: anth@uark.edu
Maintained by Carl Hitt
JoAnn D'Alisera
Associate Professor,
Director of Religious Studies
Ph.D. University of Illinois 1997
West Africa
Africans in America
Islam
American Islam
Symbolic and interpretive anthropology
Religion
Material culture
Transnational communities and identities
Selected Recent Publication
Book
An Imagined Geography: Sierra Leonean Muslims in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2004, pp.181
Articles/Chapters
“Public Spaces/Muslim Places: Locating Sierra Leonean Muslim Identity in Washington, D.C.,” African
Diaspora 3:1 (2010), 93-109
“Images of a Wounded Homeland: Sierra Leonean-American Children and the New Heart of
Darkness,” Nancy Foner (ed.), Family Ties: Immigrant Families in America. New York: New York
University Press. (2009), pp 114-34
“Icons of Longing: Homeland and Memory in the Sierra Leonean Diaspora,” PoLar: The Political and
Legal Anthropology Review 25:2 (2002), 73-89
“I [Heart]Islam: Popular Religious Commodities, Sites of Inscription, and Transnational Sierra Leonean Identity,”
Journal of Material Culture 6:1 (2001), 89-108
“Field of Dreams: The Anthropologist Far Away at Home,” Anthropology and Humanism 24 (1999), 5-19
“Born in the USA: Naming Ceremonies of Infants among Sierra Leoneans in the American Capital,”
Anthropology Today 14 (1998), 16-18
Courses Taught
ANTH 1023 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
ANTH 3123 Anthropology of Religion
ANTH 4363 Museums, Material Culture, and the Popular Imagination
ANTH 4513 African Religions: Gods, Witches, Ancestors
ANTH 4583 Sub-Saharan African Cultures
ANTH 4903 Material Religion
ANTH 5113 Anthropology of the City
ANTH 6813 Fieldwork, Fieldnotes, and Ethnographic Writing