July 17, 2012
Dr. Melanie G. Wiber joined the University of New Brunswick in 1987 and has been Full Professor of Anthropology since 1995. Her research focuses on economic and legal anthropology, natural resource management, the fisheries, and gender issues.
Dr. Wiber is currently finishing up a six-year project on integrated coastal management with the Coastal Community and University Research Alliance (CURA), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). On this project, she collaborated with a team of community organizations and served on the management team. In addition, Dr. Wiber is participating in the five-year Canadian Capture Fisheries Research Network, where she is working on Project 1.1 (social sciences in support of assessing knowledge needs in fisheries management). Dr. Wiber supervised both masters and doctoral students funded by both projects.
Dr. Wiber has received numerous national and international research grants, including SSHRC standard research, conference and workshop grants, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology funding, and a visiting scholar grant from Wageningen University in the Netherlands. She has been a regular visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany, focusing primarily on legal pluralism and property studies.
Her recent publications have focused on new forms of property rights in quota management systems and in genetics, cultural property, community-based management in the fisheries, and gender issues. The University of New Brunswick has granted Dr. Wiber two Merit Awards (1998, 2006), and a Research Professorship (2003). She is a board member for the International Commission on Legal Pluralism (1999 to the present), and has served as Commission Secretariat (2001-2006). She is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Legal Pluralism