It is with great pleasure that we announce Professor Rosemary Joyce as the new Interim Director of the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies. Director Joyce's appointment will last January 1 - July 1, 2021.
Rosemary Joyce is a Professor of Anthropology and an archeologist who conducted fieldwork in Honduras from 1977 to 2009, and continues to conduct research on Honduran collections in museums throughout Europe and the Americas. She defines her research as concerning how things make people as people make things. Studying how pottery vessels and figures were made, she traces the movement of clay and other geologic materials across the landscape of tropical river valleys in Honduras from 1600 BC to international art markets today. Her most recent books are Painted Pottery From Honduras: Object Itineraries and Lives (Brill, 2017), Material Relations: The Marriage Figurines of Prehispanic Honduras (University Press of Colorado, 2014), and A Past for Nuclear Waste (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Professor Joyce joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1994, following a decade of faculty and leadership roles with Harvard University. She was appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2011 to serve as one of eleven members of the Federal Cultural Property Advisory Committee. In this role she advised the State Department on its response to foreign nations requesting protection of their cultural heritage from looting and antiquities trafficking. A former curator and assistant director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, Professor Joyce came to UC Berkeley to join its anthropological archaeology faculty and was also the Director of UC Berkeley’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology (1994-1999). Dedicated to increasing diversity among both faculty and students, Professor Joyce was a co-recipient of the Leon Henkin Citation for Distinguished Service from the Academic Senate’s Committee on Student Diversity and Academic Development.