Shannon Dawdy at work in St. Anthony’s Garden in the French Quarter, New Orleans, 2009
Shannon Dawdy was on a city bus in Chicago, en route to an appointment with her hairdresser, when her cell phone rang. Even though the screen said “unknown caller,” she answered.
“The person calling said, ‘This is Daniel Socolow,’ a name that at that time I didn’t recognize,” she recalls. “There was lots of noise on the bus and it was a bad connection. He asked if could get off the bus and call him back, so I stood on someone’s stoop and called him back and stood up my hair dresser.”
The appointment could wait. Socolow, she soon learned, is the director of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Fellows Program, and he was calling to tell Dawdy she had been chosen to receive one of its 2010 fellowships, popularly known as “genius awards,” which carries with it an unrestricted $500,000 stipend payable over five years.
An assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, Dawdy received Rackham’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2003 for what eventually grew into her first single-author book, Building the Devil’s Empire: French Colonial New Orleans. Published in 2008, its narrative of how everyday life there evolved against the grain of the mother country’s agenda has been widely praised for the originality of its conception, the elegance of its writing, and its boundary-busting scholarship, deftly deploying the tools of archeology, anthropology and history.
Her path to this potpourri of disciplines began at Reed College, where she earned her undergraduate degree.
“I had a hard time deciding between anthropology and history and ended up selecting anthropology because it seemed easier to do material culture,” she says, “but I always was straddling those two fields, and never really liked being asked to totally commit to one or the other, which is part of the reason I drifted to archeology as the most conventionally historical subfield of anthropology.”
Rackham seemed like the perfect fit for her interdisciplinary inclinations. “I knew that I needed to do a lot of archival work to do the dissertation I wanted to do on French colonial New Orleans,” says Dawdy. “No one had really written a history of French colonial New Orleans, so I needed a program that was going to help me get that training and allow me to do that interdisciplinary dissertation. The culture at Michigan, and Rackham in particular, which emphasizes interdisciplinarity, was attractive in general, but what specifically attracted me was the very strong interdepartmental program in anthropology and history.”
After graduating from Reed, she had spent four years “getting real-life experiences, which I recommend all my students do. I lived in Europe for a while, worked at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and played drums in a rock band.”
It was at the de Young Museum that “my interest in material culture crystallized,” she says. “I knew that one of my strengths was writing, and interacting with the curators at the museum gave me confidence that this might be an area that I could contribute to.”
And how did she happen to focus her attention and skills on New Orleans? “That was accidental,” she says. “My husband’s a jazz musician, so after I had dragged him to Virginia for my first master’s (from the College of William and Mary), I let him choose the next place to live and he picked New Orleans. It ended up working beautifully for both of us.”
Her fascination with the Crescent City continues unabated: two projects she’d like to support with her MacArthur funds are an archeological study of Holt Cemetery there, and the development of collaborations among researchers in Havana, Vera Cruz and New Orleans, three Gulf of Mexico cities that are connected historically and ecologically.
Dawdy’s research interest in New Orleans is matched only by her affection for it. After Hurricane Katrina struck on August 29, 2005, she was determined to use her expertise in the service of its restoration.
“I worked intensively from October 5 through December 31, 2005, right after the storm, embedded within FEMA as a liaison between their historic preservation division and the state of Louisiana’s preservation division,” Dawdy says. “We did windshield surveys, looking at every historic property and every historic neighborhood in New Orleans, taking an inventory of the damage and trying to anticipate what future damage might occur through reconstruction.”
She’s also rather fond of her most recent alma mater. “Now that I’m on the other side of things, I personally don’t know of a graduate program that supports its doctoral students as well as Michigan does,” she says. “I was actually happy as a graduate student, which is rather unusual. And I was blessed with fantastic advisors at Michigan, who provided models I‘m now trying to follow.”
Published in: Alumni Updates