Sarah Bakker

Office hours are by appointment via Zoom.

Bio:

A sociocultural anthropologist by training, Sarah Bakker Kellogg teaches introductory and advanced social research methods. She received her Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz, where she was trained in religious studies, sound studies, multi-sensory ethnography, feminist theory, and critical race studies. Since 2014, she has taught as Lecturer Faculty in the departments of sociology, anthropology, and women’s and gender studies at SF State. In the classroom, Sarah practices anti-racist and trauma-informed pedagogy in order to create a nurturing and collaborative learning space, and employs techniques inspired by Writing Across the Curriculum to support students as they develop their unique scholarly voices.

As an interdisciplinary and publicly-engaged scholar, Sarah bridges North American, European, and Middle Eastern conversations about racism, religious difference, gender, and global migration politics through ongoing ethnographic research among the global Syriac (also known as the Assyrian or Aramaean) diaspora. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships such as the Social Science Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Writing Fellowship, and the Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship, Sarah has presented widely at international conferences and published articles on secularism and aesthetics, the racialization of ethno-religious identity, and the transnational politics of minority recognition in flagship journals like American Ethnologist,Current Anthropology, and Cultural Anthropology. She is currently finishing a book project tentatively titled Sonic Icons: Kinship, Christianity, and the Ethics of Recognition in a Syriac World on the role of religious understandings of kinship in the formation of transnational sociopolitical identities among Middle Eastern Christian refugee and immigrant communities in Western Europe.