Aron Marie (he/they) is joining the College faculty as an Assistant professor of anthropology and American Sign Language. Drawing on over a decade working with deaf/disabled people in Vietnam and the United States, his research focuses on how disabled people and their allies create political movements and communicate in innovative, non-normative ways. His dissertation explored the development of sign language interpreting in Hanoi, Vietnam, and the way interpreting shapes the public perception of deaf voices.

Most recently a visiting professor with the Rochester Institute of Technology, National Technical Institute for the Deaf, Marie earned his Ph.D. in comparative human development from the University of Chicago and his B.A. in political science from UC San Diego. Marie’s publications include “Entangled Interdependence: Sign Language Interpreting without Recognition in India and Vietnam,” published in 2021 in the journal PoLAR, the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and “Finding interpreters who can “OPEN-THEIR-MIND”: How Deaf teachers select sign language interpreters in Hà Nội, Việt Nam,” for the book Sign Language Ideologies in Practice. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, and Fulbright Program.

As an assistant professor at UVA, Marie will teach “Anthropology of Disability,” “Deaf Studies in the Global South” and “Sign, Gesture and Language.”