All Eyes On: Julie Flowerday

She stayed in a traditional, open-plan house made of stones and mud. She ate flatbread and potatoes harvested in the summer to feed everyone through winter and spring. She learned Burushaski to communicate with the locals and learn their culture.

This was assistant professor of anthropology Julie Flowerday's life in 1992, as she researched the landscape changes in Hunza Valley, located in the Karakoram mountain range of northern Pakistan.

Born in Detroit, Mich., Flowerday didn't plan to become an anthropology professor. She began her academic career as a pre-medicine undergraduate at Wayne State University in Michigan. She was drawn into the field of anthropology during her travels.

 She stopped in London in 1989 on her way back from a trip to South Asia. While touring University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies library, she stumbled upon a steel filing cabinet with the word ‘Hunza' on the drawer. She was intrigued. She remembered Hunza as a place in South Asia where people lived to be octogenarians and ran up and down the mountains. The glass lantern slides inside the drawer turned out to be David Lorimer's 1930s research work about Hunza Valley. She didn't realize the significance of these photographs until much later.

When she returned to the United States, she took a job as a secretary and simultaneously enrolled in a course for medical students wanting to join the genetics program. She completed her coursework but wasn't eligible for the program. She was advised by the anthropologist who taught the genetics course to try the anthropology program instead. Heeding this advice, she gave up her lunch hours and enrolled in a graduate anthropology course for incoming students.

"I started off as the worst student and ended up at the top of the class," she said. "Then I got invited to join the program."

Her choice proved to be a lucrative one. In 1992, she received a travel grant to go to Hunza Valley. She remembered she had come across David Lorimer's research in London and based her dissertation on the photographs.

"I took these little contact sheets and looked around and walked away thinking ‘Oh my goodness, I can see a lot of the things in the photographs that are still on the landscape, but I see a lot of change too,'" she said. "So I asked myself, if the landscape is changing, does that mean the way people understand themselves is also changing? I did a dissertation that looked at the relationship between changing landscape and shifting knowledge."

She has been researching the transitions in Hunza Valley since. However, conflicts in the Kashmir and Afghan areas have begun to reach the valley and the peaceful atmosphere professor Flowerday had worked in is becoming increasingly unstable. In 2009, she was unable to obtain a visa to enter the Hunza area.

Even though she was disappointed she couldn't carry out her fieldwork, Flowerday has found a new passion in teaching.

"It just sort of happened at a time when I was looking for something to settle in," she said. "The issues in South Asia are unstable, and it's not likely that I'm going to be able to do the kind of work that I enjoy doing."

Before coming to Truman, she taught at University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Chapel Hill, North Carolina State University at Raleigh, Elon University in North Carolina and the University of the South at Sewanee, Tenn.

"Of all the places I've taught, I think the students are the sharpest here," she said. "They really do their reading. They are interested in the materials, and they perform at a higher level regularly than students at other universities I have found. There's a working ethic that I like about Missouri in the sense that it's in the Midwest and kind of captures the values that are lost in big cities."

In addition to teaching, Flowerday is active in committees and organizations including the Fulbright committee, the Global Issues group and the Asian Studies minor committee and serves as the coordinator for the Bangladesh program.

"I've been really impressed with the amount of energy and creativity Dr. Flowerday brings into class preparations and the amount of investment she has in helping students succeed in class," said Amber Johnson, chair of the Department of Society and Environment. "She's always happy. She's got a really positive attitude and is a good person to have around. She's never been afraid to try something new, and that's a wonderful thing to have in a professor, somebody willing to risk her own comfort for the sake of providing a good experience for students."

Senior Kathrine Olsen Flaate has taken several of Flowerday's courses. She said she learned a lot from Flowerday.

"She's a very nice lady and she's an incredible, good professor," Olsen Flaate said. "She'll always help you out if you need anything. She's a very understandable professor as well. I really like her teaching methods. It's very discussion based. We learn a lot of different perspectives."