Jonathan Larson
GYV
Staff Member:
'97, '94
Education:
BA in History and German, University of Vermont; MA & PhD in Anthropology,
University of Michigan
Favorite GYV Memory: Cultural sharing nights
and all the impromptu stuff that often happened after them.
Most interesting country visited: Japan
Biography:
I grew up spending a lot of time on the road between the mountains of
Vermont and the beaches of Cape Cod. Perhaps that has something to do
with the direction my life has taken since. In high school I participated
in exchange programs to Japan and what was then the Soviet Union. I
tried to share as much from these travels as I could with other members
of my community, meeting with teachers, local businesspeople, and even
appearing on local television.
After
a year at the University of Konstanz in Germany during college, I decided
to return to Europe to teach English in Slovakia for two years. When
I returned to the US, I decided that I wanted to develop tools that
would give me deeper insights into other cultures and ended up in a
doctoral program in cultural and linguistic anthropology, a subject
that I had somehow never known much about it. It's been a perfect fit,
and the last two years I've been thrilled to have the chance to use
my graduate education and experiences with other cultures to teach courses
on cultural anthropology, language and culture, capitalism, and Eastern
Europe and the former Soviet Union at Miami University outside of Cincinnati,
Ohio.
For
the coming year I will be turning my dissertation into a book with a
postdoctoral fellowship at Columbia University in New York. Based on
two and a half years of research in Slovakia during graduate school,
my dissertation questions the ethnocentrism with which Americans (and
Westerners) think of certain cultures as possessing or lacking "critical
thinking." It is a study of classroom practices and political culture
in Slovakia that also proposes new ways for thinking about how language
contributes the nature of a political system.
As
I write my wife, Deborah Michaels Larson, and I are about to celebrate
our fourth wedding anniversary. Deborah is about to finish her PhD in
the history and sociology of education, with a comparative global emphasis.
In my spare time I love listening to new music (my actual playing is
a bit stalled at the moment); exploring whatever geographic area I happen
to be living in (I've really continued to grow since coming to this
part of the Midwest from the Northeastern U.S.); having friends over
for dinner parties with me and Deborah (especially if we spend the evening
speaking a second language); and recreation outdoors ranging from biking
rural roads, to hiking the mountains of Slovakia, to swimming in the
ocean, to playing basketball at the gym.
