5/3/13

Piskor Lectureship Awarded to Shinu Abraham

Shinu Abraham

CANTON - St. Lawrence University Associate Professor of Anthropology Shinu Abraham has been awarded the Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lectureship for 2013. Next year, she will deliver a campus lecture, “Quest for Fire: The Search for the Origins of Ancient South Indian Glass.”

The Piskor Faculty Lectureship was established in 1979 to encourage original and continued research among St. Lawrence faculty members, to recognize and honor distinguished scholarship, and to afford the opportunity for faculty to share their learning with the academic community.

With support from the lectureship, Abraham plans to continue her ongoing research of ancient Indian glass beads. She is in the midst of documenting and analyzing excavated glass beads from the ancient South Indian port site, Pattanam/Muziris, and developing a survey project to trace the manufacture of ancient iron and glass in South India.

Abraham will travel to Hyderabad to meet local Andhra Pradesh museum and archaeology officials and faculty from the University of Hyderabad and then spend the month of June in Tirupati and the southern Andhra Pradesh region, where the field survey and museum work will take place.

Abraham received her Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Pennsylvania. Her specializations include early Indian Ocean exchange, Early Historic Tamil South India, craft production and ancient glass bead technologies. She is co-editor of Migration, Trade and Peoples Part I: Issues in Indian Ocean Trade and Commerce (2010) and most recently, Connections and Complexity: New Approaches to the Archaeology of South Asia.