Students who spend time in the Tower Café run a high chance of running into Cathy Stanton, a lecturer in the anthropology department at Tufts. While the folded eyeglasses perched on the stack of books by her side remind students of her scholarly side, it is Stanton's dedication to active learning and hands-on fieldwork that has distinguished her in the academic world.
Stanton wasn't always on track to join academia. Born in Ontario, Canada, Stanton moved to the United States after meeting her husband, a classical trumpet player. It wasn't until several years later that Stanton would continue her education at Vermont College in 1992.
"I was an arts administrator, I was a waitress, I was a freelance writer, I wrote romance novels for ten years," Stanton said. "I've done all kinds of crazy things, which was kind of a sign that I hadn't figured out what I really wanted to do."
In school, she immediately discovered that her academic passions were driven by a combined love of history and cultural studies. "What I was really interested in is what people did with the past," Stanton said.
Stanton, who has been both a student and teacher at Tufts, began her partnership with the university in 1997 when she worked with Professor of Anthropology David Guss on her master's dissertation.
After studying Civil War reenactments for two years and becoming a musician in one troop's marching band, Stanton formally joined the Tufts community in 1999 to pursue her doctorate in anthropology.
She worked closely with her professor-turned-colleague Guss, an anthropologist who studies cultural performance and ritual. After taking his classes and working as a teaching assistant, Stanton began to teach those same courses.
The anthropologist said she believes that her work directly applies to the lives, both academic and real-world, of many current Tufts students. "The realms that I'm studying, that I'm really interested in, are the realms that you guys are going to be going out into,"she said.
In anthropological and scholarly circles, Stanton finds herself constantly questioning the tendency of academia to look but not touch.
"I am really troubled by people who are able to analyze it in sometimes brilliant, elegant ways and yet who can't push it a little bit further and include themselves as part of the equation and see what the repercussions are," she said.
One of Stanton's former students, sophomore Kate Selden, said she remembers Stanton emphasizing the changes taking place in the field of anthropology. "She represents the new branch [of anthropological thinkers],"Selden said.
Guss, Stanton's former mentor, described the changes that she has been working to bring to the study of anthropology at Tufts, emphasizing the connections made to active citizenship.
"[Her work] was happening precisely at the time that Tufts was redefining itself in relation to active citizenship," Guss said. "It's all an unquestioned good and she was willing to turn it over and ask tough questions."
Stanton's thoughts on her time at Tufts reflect this awareness in the many sides of active learning. "This is a really interesting and challenging time to be at Tufts because I think that the university is so identified with civic engagement and active citizenship, which is wonderful," she said. "But there's a danger that it becomes mostly rhetorical."
Stanton's fieldwork is always changing and revolves around many community-based historical sites. In addition to teaching both at Tufts and to adult students in Vermont, Stanton recently completed a study on the Hopewell Furnace iron-making site in Pennsylvania and is working on a community-based project about the historic Polish social club in Salem, Mass.
Recently, Stanton's work in the post-industrial textile community of Lowell, Mass., was compiled into a book called "The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City," which won the 2007 National Council on Public History Book Award. While this semester marks Stanton's last at Tufts, the anthropologist will continue her work in Vermont next year and will keep lending her anthropological lens to historic sites.
And while the majority of anthropologists jet off to remote corners of the world, Stanton finds that working in America is both rewarding and relevant. "I just look around and I see that all the same things that we would study somewhere else are happening here. There's myth here, there's ritual here," she said.
As a Canadian studying American culture and customs, Stanton has been able to study American anthropology from a different angle. "The American mythology is totally foreign to me. I don't feel it. I don't have a gut connection to that," she said. "When the American national anthem plays all I think about is - that's a really hard national anthem to sing. No one can sing that!"
