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Faculty Bio | |
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Drew Hopkins
Adjunct Assistant Professor
Columbia University
Anthropology |
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Biography
Drew Hopkins, Ph.D. Biography
Drew Hopkins received his Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Columbia University in 2008., working under the guidance of Professors Myron L. Cohen and Rosalind C. Morris. His Ph.D. dissertation, Jie 節, Junctures. An Historical Ethnography of Networking & Survival in the Mountains of Western Fujian, was based upon two years of field work in a remote, mountainous region of Western Fujian province, in southeastern China and extensive archival research, is an historical ethnography that examines the challenges facing rural households in an impoverished paper-making region of southwestern Fujian. In it, he addresses ethnic relations and commercial, kinship, and sacramental networks through which rural households in remote, inner-mountain settlements have negotiated radical political-economic shifts from the late-imperial period into the present-day.
Hopkins’ research interests include Popular Religion in Late-Imperial & Contemporary China; Ethnic Discourse & the Historical Construction of Racial & Ethnic Categories in China; The Construction & Embodiment of Gendered Subjectivities in China; Identity Construction in the Chinese & Hakka Diasporas; Metaphysics of Value in Late-Imperial & Contemporary China, and Chinese Correlative Epistemology & Applied Semiotic Sciences.
Since joining the adjunct faculty in the Department of Anthropology in the fall of 2007, Hopkins has developed four graduate and undergraduate courses:
TAIWAN & ANTHROPOLOGY: HISTORY, ETHNICITY & IDENTITY IN A SUSPENDED STATE (G6150)
CHINESE STRATEGIES: HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF CULTURE IN PRACTICE (V2020)
CHINESE SOCIETIES: THE MANY WAYS OF BEING CHINESE (V2025)
CHANGING EAST ASIAN FOODWAYS: CULTURES OF EATING (ANTH V2027)
In addition to the undergraduate and graduate courses he teaches at Columbia, since 2005, Hopkins has taught at the Asian Studies Program at the City College of New York, where he has developed a range of courses addressing Chinese History and Culture, Fengshui & Traditional Chinese Medicine, Modernity, Gender & National Identity in Chinese Film and Literature and the Peoples & Cultures of Asia.
As an Historical Anthropologist, Hopkins adopts, both in his research and his course design, an approach informed by the conviction that cultural practices are most readily intelligible by situating them in the historical social and political-economic contexts in which they arose. Accordingly, in each of his courses, the institutions, conventions and practices under examination are situated in the specific historical context in which they were forged—the social and political-economic conditions in which each institution and practice was developed and deployed—and the dynamic processes by which they subsequently have been transformed. This approach to course design enables students to apprehend culture as a living assemblage of practices and to gain analytical purchase upon the processes whereby cultural institutions and conventions are (re)produced, renegotiated and transformed in the discursivity of everyday life.
The extensive education in Chinese language and culture Hopkins has received began in his undergraduate work at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he received a B.A. cum laude, in French with a minor in Chinese. Hopkins first journeyed to China as an undergraduate, in 1985-1986, when he spent a year in intensive Chinese language study at Shaanxi Normal University, in Xi’an. Subsequently, he spent two years studying classical Chinese and Chinese philosophy at National Taiwan University, in Taipei.
Prior to undertaking studies toward his Ph.D., Hopkins spent ten years working in documentary film production and as a print and broadcast journalist and editor addressing topics ranging from contemporary China to issues of international human rights, environmental crises and popular political struggles.
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