After a year of stellar reviews and visitors from all over the world, IARC staff recently traveled to New York to deinstall the second venues of Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vilcek Foundation.
Smack in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert an urban landscape emerges. The Rio Grande, or Río Bravo to those in Mexico, trickles through, designating their two countries: to the north El Paso, Texas, and to the south, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. They have separate names; however, it is impossible to consider one without the other.
Philip Deloria, 2023–2024 Katrin H. Lamon Fellow, is writing a new book that looks at American epistemology through shared experiences of the extraordinary Leonid meteor storm of November 1833—which may have generated as many as thirty meteors per second. “This is a perfect moment in America to imagine a continental history of shared experience among many peoples.”
Several years ago, I alerted our board of directors of my intention to retire after ten years as SAR’s twelfth president. I am now on the cusp of that milestone. Leading SAR has been a privilege and the pinnacle of my career as an anthropologist and educator. One thing I’ve learned over a long career, however, is that institutions need new leadership at regular intervals to meet the challenges of a changing world. That’s why I chose to step down now.
Honoring both fifty years of Resident Scholar Fellows and ten years of Michael F. Brown’s presidency at the School for Advanced Research (SAR), 105 of SAR’s esteemed supporters, board members, and friends gathered together in the newly named Michael F. Brown Plaza for a celebratory evening of bidding, buying, dining, and mingling on the evening of June 8, 2024.
Derek Xavier Garcia’s work is living and active. Not only does he interview members of the community for his dissertation and future book, he engages with them, bringing history to life in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
So far, two SAR Resident Scholar Fellows have won the National Book Award: Tiya Miles in 2021 for her book All that She Carried: the Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake and Ned Blackhawk in 2023 for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Recently, they took a moment from their very busy schedules to share a little about their residency experiences at SAR, how they impacted their lives, and also a few words about how they influenced each other.
In 1996, the Resident Scholar Program at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) did something it had not done before and hasn’t since. Three sibling scholars shared the Katrin H. Lamon fellowship: Rina Swentzell, Tessie Naranjo, and Tito Naranjo from Santa Clara Pueblo.
