Lauren Meeker

Lauren Meeker received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2007. She is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her research focuses on the cultural politics, representation, and performance of folk music and theater in Vietnam.

From 2008-2010, she co-directed, with a Vietnamese colleague, the Visual Anthropology Initiative, a two-year collaborative project to train Vietnamese ethnographers in visual anthropology, co-sponsored by the Vietnam Institute of Culture and Art Studies, Hanoi, and the Center for the Study of Vietnamese Philosophy, Culture and Society at Temple University. The project was an outgrowth of the collaborative production of the film Drums on the Red River, which she co-directed.

Her publications include “How Much for a Song? Local and National Representations of Quan Ho Folksong” (Journal of Vietnamese Studies 5.1, 2010), and the book, Sounding Out Heritage: Cultural Politics and the Social Practice of Quan Ho Folk Song in Northern Vietnam (University of Hawai’i Press, Oct. 2013).