Jamie Lee Marks is a PhD student in UF’s Anthropology department and has been teaching for the University Writing Program since Fall 2011. She has served as a mentor to incoming Graduate Assistants for the Writing Program this year. A UF alumnus, Jamie Lee received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Women’s Studies and Political Science, and Master of Arts degree in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Florida. In addition, she earned a Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults from the University of Cambridge. She describes her experience as a UF undergraduate student as demanding, liberating, and transformational because of committed instructors that required high quality written work and dialogue-based classroom environments that challenged her to connect her lived experience to scholarly materials. These experiences inspired a commitment to undergraduate pedagogy and education at the University of Florida. Working with undergraduate students has and continues to teach, move, and motivate her, as each student brings with her or him a particular perspective on each course’s subject matter and, more broadly, on human social interaction and connection. She considers teaching one of the most rewarding components of graduate studies.
As a cultural anthropologist, she is primarily interested in ethnographic field methods, and narrative ethnography as a genre allowing social scientists—and artists—to move their experiences to text and share them with various audiences. She has worked as a contracted researcher and also done fieldwork in Lima, Huaraz, and Huánuco, Peru; Mallorca, Spain; and Gainesville, Florida. Her work thus far has explored themes of narrating migration, mobility and transportation infrastructure, and representations of gender in popular culture both in the United States and Peru. Her dissertation project currently focuses on the politics, aesthetics, and experiences of contemporary transport reform in Lima, Peru.