Tamara Bray awarded 2016-17 Marilyn Williamson Endowed Distinguished Faculty Fellowship

Wayne State University Anthropology Professor Tamara L. Bray has been named the WSU Humanities Center's Marilyn Williamson Endowed Distinguished Faculty Fellow for 2016-17.

Thanks to a generous endowment provided by former Provost Marilyn L. Williamson, the Humanities Center offers an annual Distinguished Faculty Fellowship to tenured faculty (associate and full professors) in the humanities as defined by the NEH, the arts and related disciplines.

The award of this single $20,000 fellowship is based on the merit of the individual research project proposed for the fellowship term and on the exceptional contribution the proposed project will make to the humanities and its potential for scholarly recognition and publication, exhibition or performance.

The Faculty Fellowship Award will be used by Bray to help initiate a new interdisciplinary research project focused on the central religious precinct of Copacabana, Bolivia, this summer. The town of Copacabana has been a pilgrimage destination and a site of extraordinary reverence for millennia.

Situated on the Bolivian side of Lake Titicaca, Copacabana formerly comprised one the most sacred ceremonial complexes in the Inca Empire.

The principal aim of the study is to investigate the nature of Inca engagement with this powerful locale as evidenced archaeologically through spatial and material patterns and practices.

The ultimate goals of the project are to obtain insights into the ways in which topographies of the sacred are constructed, how attachments to place are formed and transformed over time, and how power, place and identity are materially and mutually constituted.

Bray will present a special lecture at the Humanities Center during the 2016-17 academic year.