Shannon Lee Dawdy

Shannon Lee Dawdy is an anthropologist whose fieldwork combines archaeological, archival, and ethnographic methods with a focus on the U.S. and Latin America. The central thread running through her work concerns how landscapes and material objects mediate human relationships, from an examination of the historical ecologies of capitalism (Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans, 2008) or the emotional trajectories of those who lost their intimate object worlds to Hurricane Katrina (Patina: A Profane Archaeology, 2015). Her current project (through a documentary film and related book) focuses on rapidly changing death practices in the U.S.