Vassar Asian Studies

martha kaplan Professor of Anthropology
office Anthropology: BH-316 / Box 220 e-mail Contact Martha Kaplan	phone Anthropology: 845/437/5504 website http://faculty.vassar.edu/makaplan/

Martha Kaplan has been teaching at Vassar since 1990. She went to Bryn Mawr College as an undergraduate and then received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago.

Ms. Kaplan's research is in cultural anthropology, with interests in ritual and colonial and post-colonial societies. She has pursued research in the Fiji Islands and in India. She is the author of Neither Cargo Nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji (Duke University Press, 1995), a study of an anti-colonial political and religious movement, and of Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization (co-author John D. Kelly, University of Chicago Press, 2001).

Ms. Kaplan's teaching interests range from myth, ritual, and symbol, to social and cultural theory, to colonial and postcolonial societies. In Asian Studies she has taught seminars on "Imagining Asia" and on "Asian Diasporas."