My Biography
Rena Lederman (PhD, Columbia University) is an expert in exchange, politics, gender meanings and ideologies, historical consciousness, and socioeconomic transformation. Dr. Lederman has conducted fieldwork concerning these areas in Highland Papua New Guinea. Recent work includes the comparative anthropology of knowledge practices (anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, journalism) and of research ethics across the human sciences. She’s published a book and several journal articles and chapters based on her Melanesian research, and organized panels nearly every year at the AAA. While she published a collection on the politics of regulating “human subjects” research in American Ethnologist and coauthored the AAA’s commentary on revisions to the regulations governing IRBs, she also collaborated for several years in a national, cross-disciplinary working group. Dr. Lederman’s first AAA annual meeting was in 1971.