Biography
Dr. Zorn was an associate professor who specialized in cultural anthropology. She was also the Associate Director of UCF’s Digital Ethnography Lab. She received a B.F.A. from the California College of the Arts, an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas, and the M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University in 1997. Her research focused on how highland South American indigenous communities cope with globalization, with particular interests in ethnology, political economy, gender, tourism, art and crafts, and the representation of culture on the Internet. Dr. Zorn conducted fieldwork in the Andes, particularly in Bolivia and Peru. She co-directed the PeruVine/PeruDigital Project, which is building an interactive and immersive website to present field data from Peru’s Institute of Ethnomusicology online. She taught General Anthropology, Cultures of Latin America, Peoples of the World, Ancient Incas, and Anthropology of Tourism. Her publications include the books Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island (2004), and the Encyclopedia of Native American Artists (2008).
Dr. Zorn joined UCF in 1998. She sadly passed away in June 2010.
Research Areas
Cultural anthropology, ethnology, tourism (communitarian, indigenous), digital ethnography, globalization, crafts and crafts commercialization, contemporary indigenous arts, material culture (cloth), gender, theoretical anthropology, representation and collaborative research on the Internet; North America, Latin America, especially Andes (Peru, Bolivia)
Highlights
May 2005: Joan Morris and Elayne Zorn have been recommended as 2005 CAS Teaching Incentive Program (TIP) award recipients. The TIP program rewards faculty for teaching productivity and excellence. Selection criteria include teaching quality and effectiveness, commitment to instruction, innovation, creativity, and productivity based on a portfolio of assignments and evaluations collected over the previous 4 academic years.
March 2005: Elayne Zorn was interviewed on the Augustana Public Radio program “About Books” by co-host Faye Clow, of the Bettendorf Public Library Information Center of Augustana College. Zorn discussed her new book on Andean weaving, Weaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island(University of Iowa Press, 2004). The interview is available on the Internet during April 2005 at http://www.augustana.edu/wvik/listings-aboutbooks.htm.