Academics
Adrie Kusserow
Professor Kusserow is currently chair of the department and a cultural anthropologist with special interest in refugees, social inequalities, poverty, anthropology of religion, anthropology of the child, psychological anthropology, ethnographic writing and illness and healing cross culturally.
She strongly encourages both service work and field work to be an integral part of her anthropology classes. She is also a strong proponent of study abroad. In 2002 she was named the Vermont Professor of the Year sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation.
Courses she teaches:
- Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
- Culture, Illness and Healing
- Social Inequalities
- Refugees and Modern Day Slavery
- Ethnographic Writing
Professor Kusserow has done field work in New York, Nepal, India, Bhutan, Sudan and Uganda. She has done field work on Sudanese and Tibetan refugees, the spread and popularization of Tibetan Buddhism in the West as well as social class and conceptions of the child in New York City (see her book American Individualisms).
Most recently she gave a paper at the Fourth International Gross National Happiness conference in Thimphu, Bhutan (www.bhutanstudies.org.bt/) She also works with her husband, Robert Lair and some of the local “Lost Boys” of Sudan on the New Sudan Education Initiative (www.nesei.org/) which opened their first secondary school in Yei, South Sudan, in May 2008.
Professor Kusserow is also an ethnographic poet writing about her experiences in Asia and Africa. Her first book of poems Hunting Down the Monk (www.boaeditions.org/) was published in 2002 by BOA Editions, Ltd. as part of their New American Poets Series. Her next book of poems War Metaphysics for a Sudanese Girl she hopes to have done in 2010. In 2001 she was the Society for Humanistic Anthropology Poetry Prize winner and her poetry appears in Anthropology and Humanism as well as more popular poetry journals and magazines such as Harvard Review, The Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Sun, Salmagundi, and Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad.
SKULL TREES, South Sudan
Arok, hiding from the Arabs in the branches of a tree,
two weeks surviving on leaves,
legs numb, mouth dry.
When the mosquitoes swarmed
and the bodies settled limp as petals under the trees,
he shinnied down, scooping out a mud pit with his hands
sliding into it like a snake,
his whole body covered except his mouth.
Perhaps others were near him,
lying in gloves of mud, sucking bits of air through the swamp holes,
mosquitoes biting their lips,
but he dared not look.
What did he know of the rest of South Sudan, pockmarked with bombs,
skull trees with their necklaces of bones,
packs of bony Lost Boys
roving like hyenas towards Ethiopia,
tongues, big as toads, swelling in their mouths.
the sky pouring its relentless bombs of fire. Of course they were
tempted to lie down for a moment,
under the lone tree, with its barely shade,
to rest just a little while before moving on,
the days passing slyly, hallucinations
floating like kites above them
until the blanched bones lay scattered in a ring around the tree,
tiny ribs, skulls, hip bones -- a tea set overturned,
as the hot winds whistled through them
as they would anything, really,
and the sky, finally exhausted,
moving on.
Reprinted from The Best American Poetry 2008
Aside from poetry and anthropology, Professor Kusserow is lucky enough to live on the land she grew up on in Underhill Center with her husband Robert Lair, (adjunct lecturer in religious studies at St. Michael’s College) and two children, Ana Grace and Willem and her mother, Suzanne Kusserow.