Jennifer Huss Basquiat
JENNIFER HUSS BASQUIAT {[email protected]} received her BA and MA from California State University, Los Angeles in Communication Studies and her second MA and PhD from Claremont Graduate School in Cultural Studies. She is a tenured professor in Anthropology at the College of Southern Nevada. Professionally, she considers herself to be a critical ethnographer above all and has conducted extensive fieldwork in Haiti where she lived during her doctoral research. She is primarily interested in cultural identity as it is informed by religion. Her doctoral dissertation, Between Eternal Truth and Local Culture: Performing Mormonism in Haiti, explored the connection between Haitian culture, Vodou, and Mormonism. This dissertation received the “Dissertation of the Year” award from the Religious Communication Association in 2001 and portions of this work have also been published in Dialogue. In addition, she has had her research regarding Mormon feminism published in The Harvard Divinity School’s Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion for which she was awarded the journal’s prestigious New Scholar Award in 2001. Most recently, she has been conducting fieldwork within plural (polygamous) communities, primarily Centennial Park, for the past five years. She also served as a credited consultant for the National Geographic program, Polygamy USA. She is currently working on a book titled Underground, but in the Light: The Plural Community of Centennial Park. As an interesting departure from her usual research, she will also be included in the academic zombie anthology, Romancing the Zombie, to be published next year.