Department of Archeology Welcomes New Assistant Professor

Daniella Gandolfo has joined the Department of Archeology as an assistant professor.

Her research areas of interest include urban anthropology; urbanization and urban social movements; social and cultural theory; anthropological writing. She has done fieldwork research in Latin America and the United States. 

Gandolfo comes to Wesleyan from the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University where she completed her doctoral degree and taught a course on cultural anthropology. Prior to that, she taught in the Department of Anthropology at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. She has gained additional teaching and professional experience from Barnard College in New York, the University of Texas, and the Ford Foundation in New York. She has participated in research projects dealing with educational reform in Lima and New York City, where she did extensive fieldwork research in public schools.

Gandolfo, who is fluent in English and Spanish, was born and raised in Lima, Peru. She received a bachelor’s of arts in archeology at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and a master’s of arts in anthropology at the University of Texas. Her dissertation, The City at its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima, Peru, was completed at Columbia University.

Her dissertation deals with the social impact of an urban renewal project of the downtown area of Lima, which it takes as a point of departure to examine relations of class and race in the city. As an outgrowth of her dissertation, she has become interested in urban “informality” and its influence on urban planning and city politics, and in new forms of urbanization in Peru.  She has started fieldwork research on these themes in Lima and in Puquio, a small city in the southern highlands of Peru.

She started teaching at Wesleyan in the fall semester.

“Wesleyan offers what, to me, is an ideal environment to keep growing as a teacher, researcher, and writer,” she says. “I enjoy the smaller-sized programs with great faculty and students.”

Gandolfo says Wesleyan allows her to maintain strong links between teaching and her research interests, and enjoys sharing her research interests with the students.

“I have already benefited greatly from sharing work in progress with students, who thrive with complex questions and problems,” she says.

Gandolfo is the author of “José María Arguedas,” published in the Biographical Dictionary of Social and Cultural Anthropology in 2004, and The City at its Limits: Taboo, Transgression, and Urban Renewal in Lima, Peru, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007.

Gandolfo has made numerous presentations, most recently at the New School University in New York and the American Anthropological Association Meeting in Washington, DC. In addition, she is involved with professional associations including the American Anthropological Association, the American Ethnological Society and the Latin American Studies Association.

Gandolfo lives in Middletown and New York City, with her husband, Chris Parkman.  She enjoys jogging, hiking, cooking and knitting – a hobby inherited from a long line of women knitters and embroiderers from the south of

Peru.