News Archive

What have we been up to? 

2025

4/25/2025 Dr. Michele R. Buzon won the College of Liberal Arts Kofmehl Award.

4/25/2025 Dr. Elizabeth Brite won the Charles B. Murphy Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award.

4/24/2025 Fionna Fahey, graduate student, was selected to receive the 2025 CLA Graduate Student Excellence in Research (CLA GSEIR) Award

4/23/2025 Dr. Melanie Beasley was selected for the Blue Sky Award for Excellence in Interdisciplinary and Inclusive Pedagogy from the Blue Sky Teaching and Learning Laboratory. The award recognizes exceptional innovation in teaching and learning. Dr. Beasley was selected for her project titled "Generating 3-D Scans of Bone Fragments" that highlights the use of hands-on experiential learning in Anth 215: Intro to Forensic Anthropology through student engagement with scanning non-human bone fragments. ECE graduate student RA Talha Mahmud and undergraduate student Caroline Albright participated in presenting the project with Dr. Beasley."

4/23/2025 Anthropology students- Sophie Mbongo, Lauren Riina, Alexis Wrede and Anna Wrobel were all inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

4/21/2025 Undergraduate student, Juniper Rodriguez, won the College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Senior Award; the Department of English Award for Creative Nonfiction; the Peter C. Braeger Memorial Award; and the Science, Technology, and Humanities Award.

4/15/2025 Dr. Andrew Flachs, along with Glenn Davis Stone, Steven Hallett, and K. R. Kranthi, published the article "GM Crops and the Jevons Paradox: Induced Innovation, Systemic Effects and Net Pesticide Increases From Pesticide-Decreasing Crops" in the Journal of Agrarian Change. 

4/12/2025 Graduate Student, Ashley Fitzpatrick, was selected for the Purdue team for the Emory Morningside Global Health Case Competition.

4/9/2025 Dr. Sarah Renkert won Seeds for Success Acorn Award for UNSA NEXUS-PH III research grant.

3/29/2025 Dr. Kali Rubaii was interviewed in The World on March 28th. Listen to "Study: High levels of uranium and lead found in bones of Iraqis linked to conflict" here.

3/24/2025 Dr. Andrew Flachs, José Becerra, Fionna Fahey, and Patricia Mathu published their article “Skilling and social reproduction” with Sage Publishing and Outlook on Agriculture.

3/24/2025 Dr. Kali Rubaii along with collegues published Lessons from "Fallujah: War Returnees Face Long-Term Health Risks from Heavy Metal Exposure" in the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University.

3/19/2025 Dr. Melanie Beasley's presentation, "Neanderthals may have eaten maggots as part of their diet", at the American Association of Biological Anthropologists meeting last week was covered by Science journalist Ann Gibbons. In collaboration with Drs. Julie Lesnik (Wayne State University) and John Speth (University of Michigan), this research explores how high nitrogen values in Neanderthals might be explained by eating maggots feeding on putrid animal tissue.

3/4/2025 Dr. Amanda Veile, along with collaborators and students, has published a new paper in Ecology of Food and Nutrition, "Preliminary Ethnographic Analysis of Infant Complementary Foods in a Peruvian Quechua Community." Co-authored with Professors Rocío Chávez Cabello and Violeta Rojas Bravos from Universidad Nacional Hermilio Valdizán (UNHEVAL), Peru, along with Sophie Mbongo (Purdue anthropology student) and Yu Chung (recently graduated Purdue Health Sciences student), this interdisciplinary research applies quantitative ethnographic methods to highlight the importance of cultural perspectives in understanding infant feeding behaviors in global context.

3/4/2025 Dr. Elizabeth Eklund along with a collegues published "Small and mid-sized cities at the centre of climate adaptation in the global South: planning and policy responses", a research article published in International Development Planning Review Volume 47, Number 2.

3/3/2025 In collaboration with Anna Jenkins (Purdue Anth BA), Emma Maggert (Purdue History MA), and Sarah Schrader (Purdue Anth PhD), Dr. Michele R. Buzon recently published an article in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, "Daily Life in a New Kingdom Fortress Town in Nubia: A Reexamination of Physical Activity at Tombos."

2/21/2025 Dr. Andrew Flachs wrote an op ed in the IndyStar "Free school meals save taxpayers money in the long run" in which he gently suggests that feeding children is good.   

1/16/2025 Dr. Risa Cromer was recently quoted in an article written by Jessica Hamzelou for MIT Technology Review "Inside the strange limbo facing millions of IVF embryos".

1/14/2025 Dr. Kali Rubaii co-authored "Deferral and dispersal: The military violence of post-war clean-up" in the journal Human Organization. It's based on recent fieldwork funded by Purdue's ERSS grant.

1/14/2025 Dr. Courtney Wittekind published an article “Build the New City as Fast as Possible”: Speculation as Subsistence in Peri‐Urban Myanmar featured in Antipode. This article examines an ambitious plan to construct a new city outside Yangon, Myanmar and sheds light on how project‐affected populations envision their own futures after agriculture.

2024

12/24/2024 Dr. Kali Rubaii has a new article "Cement and displacement: Material life in the wake of extractive war," in American Ethnologist.

12/5/2024 Meredith Aulds, PhD candidate, has a new podcast episode with the Sausage of Science, enitled SOS 208: Meredith Aulds: Midwifery integration and home-to-hospital transfer during childbirth.

12/4/2024 Dr. Zoe Nyssa has 2 articles in a special issue on “Diversifying Voices in Conservation” in the journal Conservation Biology. The articles report on a 5-year effort of the Society for Conservation Biology’s Disciplinary Inclusion Task Force to understand the experiences of marginalized members of the conservation community and how to broaden access to and participation in conservation organizations. The 2 articles are "A framework for promoting disciplinary diversity and inclusion through epistemic justice" and "Enhancing disciplinary diversity and inclusion in conservation science and practice based on a case study of the Society for Conservation Biology".

12/3/2024 Graylin Skates, graduate student, received the Society for Medical Anthropology Student Travel Award to American Anthropology Association Conference. 

12/2/2024 Dr. Risa Cromer won the 2024 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize from The Society for Medical Anthropology for her book Conceiving Christian America. This prize is awarded annually for a "significant contribution to scholarship on gender and health.

11/29/2024 Dr. Michele R. Buzon and Katie M. Whitmore, 2019 Purdue PhD, contributed "Dwarfism in Ancient Egypt/Nubia: Utilising the Bioarchaeology of Care Approach to Investigate Léri-Weill Dyschondrosteosis" in the new book, Disability in Ancient Egypt and Egyptology All Our Yesterdays.

11/25/2024 Dr. Andrew Flachs has an Op-Ed published "Why the Department of Government Efficiency could be costly for the country," in The Hill.

11/15/2025 Dr. Elizabeth Eklund along with a collegue published Intersectionality shapes the access to various adaptive resources in climate-vulnerable contexts a paper in Environmental Research: Climate, Volume 3, Number 4.

11/7/2024 Congratulations to Dr. Dada Docot for the edited collection "Plural Entanglements: Philippine Studies" for winning Best Book in the Social Sciences in the Philippines' 42nd National Book Awards, the prize facilitated by the National Book Development Board and the Manila Critics Circle that honors the most outstanding book titles published in the Philippines.

10/25/2024 Ph.D. student Cassie Apuzzo spoke about her research as part of the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS) Conversations with Collaborating Scholars Webinar series on Archaeological Sciences in Historical Archaeology. 

10/18/2024 Fionna Fahey, graduate student, published a book review in the Catalyst feminism, theory, technoscience journal newest issue Vol. 10 No. 2. Her book review is In the Shadow of the Palms: More-than-Human Becomings in West Papua, by Sophie Chao (Duke University Press, 2022).

10/5/2024 Patricia Mathu's co-edited book, Playing in the Dirt, was released by Combos Press. The money from the copies funds benefitting mutual aid for queer midwestern farmers.

10/1/2024 Dr. Stacy Lindshield, Papa Ibnou Ndiaye, Addie Walters, and Stephanie L. Bogart published A survey of nocturnality and risk for savanna chimpanzees at Assirik, Senegal in Folia Primatologica in August.

8/15/2024 Juan Manuel Arévalo Viveros, graduate student, recently published an article in Colombia Aproximaciones a la historia industrial de Popayán entre los siglos xvi y xix about the history of the Industrial sector in Popayán - Colombia.

8/6/2024 PhD candidate Jose Ramon Becerra Vera was recently on Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast discussing air pollution data to help better health and the community.

7/8/2024 Drs. Ian Lindsay (co-PI), Nicole Kong (PI), and Rajesh Kalyanam (co-PI) received a National Science Foundation Grant from the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC), titled CyberTraining: Implementation: Small: Enabling the Geospatial Turn in the Social Sciences through Cyberinfrastructure Training

6/20/2024 PhD candidate Emily Fletcher published an article "Digital public archaeology: Excavating data from digs done decades ago and connecting with today’s communities" in The Conversation. This is a news article written about her dissertation. 

6/20/2024 Dr. Courtney Wittekind published an article “Take Our Land” : Fronts, Fraud, and Fake Farmers in a City-to-Come" in Cultural Anthropology. This article explains changing logics of speculation among Myanmar farmers facing the prospect of urbanization and accounts for the impact of climate change and large-scale investment on smallholders.

6/20/2024 Dr. Jesse Wolfhagen (former Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Anthropology) has published a new article in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, entitled “Wool They, won’t they: Zooarchaeological perspectives on the political and subsistence economies of wool in northern Mesopotamia”. The paper, co-authored with Dr. Max Price (Durham University), is a meta-analysis of zooarchaeological data spanning the Neolithic through Late Bronze Age periods in northern Mesopotamia.  

6/19/2024 PhD candidate Meredith Aulds published a salient article regarding the sexually dimorphic nature of sacroiliac (SI) joint fusion in a contemporary skeletal population. The paper uses an evolutionary framework to examine if pelvic adaptations towards childbirth causes higher rates of SI joint fusion in males than females. It is available, open access, through the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. 

5/30/2024 Graduate student Rebecca Martinez was selected to receive the 2024 College of Liberal Arts Graduate Student Excellence in Research Award!

5/11/2024 Drs. Kali Rubaii and Ian Lindsay have been working in collaboration with health science colleagues, Ellen Wells and Aaron Specht (and more recently with our very own Ovie Agezeh) to analyze health outcomes from environmental exposures to war in Iraq. Spatial Distribution of Heavy Metal Contamination in Soils of Fallujah, Iraq.

4/30/2024 Dr. Dada Docot and forensic anthropologist Matthew C. Go published Grave Reverberations: Inherited Colonial Logics during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Philippines in the April issue of Medicine Anthropology Theory.

4/30/2024 Dr. Courtney T. Wittekind has been awarded a $75,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant for her project Influencing the Revolution: Social Media and Digital Fundraising in the United States and Myanmar, through the NEH’s Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities (DOT) program.

4/29/2024 Dr. Andrew Flachs was given the 2024 Society of Ethnobiology Menton Award.

4/19/2024 MS student Brandy Le was chosen to be part of the 2024 Yale Environmental Fellows Program. I'll be working on issues of environmental justice, oral histories, and story telling in collaboration with the Environmental Transformation Movement of Flint.

4/17/2024 The Conversation published a writeup of Dr. Andrew Flachs and Dr. Joseph Orkin's work on the links between food culture and the microbiome today, funded by the CLA Global Synergy Grant.

3/19/2024 Dr. Amanda Veile and her colleagues published a compelling response to recent claims that challenge the established science concerning the evolutionary implications of the sexual division of labor and the extent to which women engaged in hunting in the past. Can women hunt? Yes. Did women contribute much to human evolution through endurance hunting? Probably not is available, open access, through American Anthropologist.

3/4/2024 Dr. Elizabeth Eklund and Saleh Ahmed co-authored Who owns the land? Socio-cultural and economic drivers of unequal agrarian land ownership in climate-vulnerable coastal Bangladesh on Taylor & Francis Online.  

3/4/2024 Dr. Risa Cromer has a new publication in a new edited volume Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary titled FOLLICLE-STIMULATING HORMONE (FSH) AND LUTEINIZING HORMONE (LH).

2/28/2024 PhD student, Emily Fletcher was selected to participate in the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) Future Leaders Summit.

2/27/2024 Dr. Risa Cromer provided expertise and been interviewed for a recent Wall Street Journal article on the IVF issue in Alabama. 

2/25/2024 Dr. Kory Cooper had a successful book launch of The History and Archaeology of Fort Ouiatenon 300 Years in the Making along with his colleagues and co-authors.

2/16/2024 Congratulations to PhD student, Fionna Fahey for winning the SfAA 2024 Student Endowed Travel Award Winner.   

1/31/2024 Dr. Laura Zanotti was elected President-Elect of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America and will serve as President from 2027-2031.

1/4/2024 Dr. Michele Buzon's recently published article, "Tumuli at Tombos: Innovation, Tradition, and Variability in Nubia during the Early Napatan Period," is the cover article for the December issue of African Archaeological Review. 

2023

12/12/2023 PhD student, Jose Becerra was awarded a fellowship with SEEKCommons Socio-Environmental Knowledge Commons Project! It is an NSF-funded project led by the University of Notre Dame, the Open Environmental Data Project, and the HDF group to support research into open science, knowledge commons, and socio-environmental action. 

12/1/2024 Congratulations to graduate student, Olivia Palepoi on the opening of her exhibition Visualizing Sāmoan Cultural Identity: Reflections on "Returns to the Water" in the Diaspora located next to the Anthropology office on the 2nd floor in STON.

11/29/2023 Dr. Natali Valdez's book Weighing the Future was awarded the 2023 Eileen Basker Memorial Book Prize of the Society for Medical Anthropology and was a 2023 finalist for the Ludwik Fleck Book Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science.

11/17/2023 Purdue alumni Saish Solankar's work “Into The World of Frog Gigging”  won the 2023 Undergraduate Student Award for Outstanding Work from The Society for Visual Anthropology Student Awards.

11/16/2023 Dr. Sarah Renkert's "Engaging Anthropology in the Human-Centered Design Classroom" presented at the 1909 Conference in Nashville, Tennessee  was voted as a finalist for the "Epsilon Pi Tau Outstanding Conference Presentation Award." 

11/9/2023 Dr. Courtney Wittekind released an article in November along with Hilary Faxon entitled Livestreamed land: Scams and certainty in Myanmar’s digital land market. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

10/18/2023 Ph.D. candidate Kari A. Guilbault made a remarkable discovery of a medieval religious tattoo while conducting her dissertation research at the University of Warsaw, Poland. News of this discovery has been reported by multiple national and international media outlets. 

10/6/2023 Dr. Ian Lindsay led an invited heritage forensics workshop at Harvard University, entitled "Making Sense with Sensors: Using Satellites to Document Cultural Erasure." (w/ collaborators Husik Ghulyan, Adam T. Smith, and Lori Khatchadourian). 

9/28/2023 Dr. Kali Rubaii has a piece This is Why We Protect the Rivers, This is How We Love the Rivers in The Destruction of Loss is published in Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 6(2) and edited by Basit Iqbal and Rajbir Judge.

9/19/2023 Dr. Kali Rubaii for her chapter "Note the Ghosts: Among the More-than-Living in Iraq," in War-torn Ecologies, An-anarchic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East, edited volume. Ed. Umut Yildirim. ICI Press Berlin, Cultural Inquiry Series. 2023.

"Note the Ghosts" is about ghosts and toxic affects. "For a moment, the flame makes a wave of clear heat, and you stop everything, with large eyes. You can see me, my face, through the heat. You say my name like a question.... Toxic affects play tricks. They sap life. They take flesh. They give feeling." Here is the link to the chapter: https://press.ici-berlin.org/.../rubaii_note-the-ghosts.html Here is the book, open access: https://press.ici-berlin.org/doi/10.37050/ci-27/index.html

9/14/2023 Dr. Michele Buzon has a fascinating podcast episode on bioarchaeology and the ancient Nile River Valley featured in "This Is Purdue" as one of the final episodes in the 2023 Purdue Research Series.

9/14/2023 Dr. Ian Lindsay co-presented a paper, entitled "Caucasus Heritage Watch: Monitoring and Documenting Cultural Heritage in the Crosshairs of Conflict" w/ Lori Khatchadourian and Adam T. Smith). The presentation was invited by the US Department of State's Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs as part of the workshop, "Remote Sensing for Cultural Heritage Documentation and Monitoring Virtual Workshop."

9/7/2023 Dr. Tessa Farmer gave a lecture September 7th where she follows residents of Ezbet Khairallah, an informal neighborhood of Cairo, as they labor to exchange, value, and evaluate potable water and to eliminate wastewater. She argues that urban residents’ practices are a locally specific form of the sociality of water, integral to the project of being well connected -- to other people, to the neighborhood, and to state-run water infrastructures. While being well connected is often thought of as an elite project, Farmer shows how the deployment of connections is equally important to those who live on the urban margins. 

9/5/2023 Congratulations to Dr. Risa Cromer! Today her book, Conceiving Christian America: Embryo Adoption and Reproductive Politics, publishes in the Anthropologies of American Medicine series of @NYUPress.

8/22/2023 Dr. Kali Rubaii published The Cost of the 2003 US War to Iraqi People. 

8/18/2023 Congratulations to Dr. Melanie Beasley! In July, Dr. Beasley published an edited volume as part of Springer's Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology book series. This edited volume co-edited with Dr. Andrew Somerville was based on an organized session at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting.

8/18/2023 Dr. Amanda Veile has co-authored a new short report, “Urbanization, migration, and indigenous health in Peru,” with Rocío Esmeralda Chávez Cabello, Erik R Otárola-Castillo, and Violeta Rojas Bravo, and @Gracie Turner (a Purdue undergraduate)! The article has come out in the August issue of the American Journal of Human Biology.

8/10/2023 Dr. Amanda Veile has authored a new book chapter, entitled “Globalization, Diet and Child Health in Three Latin American Indigenous Populations.” It is part of an edited volume: Human Growth and Nutrition in Latin American and Caribbean Countries, edited by Sudip Datta Banik and published by Springer.

7/20/2023 Seohyung Kim was awarded the 2023 College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Master's Thesis Award.

7/20/2023 Dr. Kaitlyn Sanders was awarded the 2023 College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Dissertation Award.

7/1/2023 Congratulations to Saish Solankar for winning the Undergraduate Ethnobiologist Award from the Society of Ethnobiology, presented in Atlanta.

6/28/2023 Purdue Anthropology graduate student, and member of the Laboratory for Computational Anthropology (LCA), Trevor Keevil, co-authored Early Pleistocene cut marked hominin fossil from Koobi Fora, Kenya in the latest issue of Scientific Reports with researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and Colorado State University. The paper investigates stone tool butchery marks on the tibia of a 1.4-million-year-old hominin. The authors conclude that the observed cut marks on the tibia resulted from defleshing. They suggest that any post-defleshing cannibalism by human ancestors was likely driven by practical and utilitarian motivations, such as the need for sustenance. 

6/16/2023 Purdue University is proud to share that Jose R. Becerra Vera has been awarded a grant from the National Geographic Society. As a 2023 National Geographic Explorer, Becerra Vera will use this funding to research the environmental justice elements of uneven logistics pollution and wildfire smoke exposure in the Inland Empire region of Southern California.

6/9/2023 Anthropology Postdoctoral Research Assistant and Laboratory for Computational Archaeology (LCA) lab member Dr. Jesse Wolfhagen has published a new article in Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, entitled “Estimating the Ontogenetic Age and Sex Composition of Faunal Assemblages with Bayesian Multilevel Mixture Models”. The paper describes a new statistical method for using standard zooarchaeological measurements to estimate the age and sex composition of an assemblage by taking advantage of sexual dimorphism, resolving some issues that have complicated previous attempts to use the approach. 

4/27/2023 Dr. Michele Buzon along with Stuart Tyson Smith published "Tumuli at Tombos: Innovation, Tradition, and Variability in Nubia during the Early Napatan Period" in the African Archaeological Review.

4/26/2023 PhD candidate, Meredith Aulds received the Purdue Boiler Changemaker Award.

4/24/2023 PhD Candidate, Kaitlyn Sanders, has been awarded the Paleopathology Association Cockburn Student Prize in April, 2023. This award is given each year at the Paleopathology Association meetings to the Best Student Podium Presentation and the Best Student Poster. Kaitlyn won for her podium presentation "Trabecular bone health at the Nubian site of Tombos (1440-660 BC)" which highlighted a portion of her dissertation research.

4/21/2023 Dr. Sarah Renkert has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for research and teaching in Peru for the Spring 2024 semester. Sarah will continue her research on the politics of food aid distribution in Huaycán, while also teaching applied anthropology courses at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.

4/21/2023 Dr. Sarah Renkert received honorable mention for her paper “False Generosity: A Freirean Reflection on Food Aid and Lima’s Comedores Populares” in April 2023, for the Latin American Studies Association’s Premio José María Arguedas.

4/20/2023 Dr. Amanda Veile has been granted a Center for Families’ Faculty Fellowship! She will receive $10,000 to support her field research project, “Nutritional assessment of Yucatec Maya children in the aftermath of global disruption." This grant is made possible through the generous support of the Virginia Gould Butterfield Endowment.

4/20/2023 Dr. Amanda Veile is the new Human Biology Association Program Chair. She will serve on the executive committee and lead the organization of their annual scientific meetings starting with 2024 in Los Angeles.

4/19/2023 Dr. Ian Lindsay & A. Mkrtchyan published Free and Low-Cost Aerial Remote Sensing in Archaeology: An Overview of Data Sources and Recent Applications in the South Caucasus in Advances in Archaeological Practice, 1-20, on April 19, 2023. 

3/29/2023 Dr. Michele R. Buzon, Kari A. Guilbault, and Antonio Simonetti published Exploring Intersectional Identities and Geographic Origins in Ancient Nubia at Tombos, Sudan in Bioarchaeology International.

3/27/2023 Graduate student, Olivia Palepoi, won a literary award from Purdue University's 2023 Literary Award Contest. She received first place in the Department of Anthropology Award category for an ethnographic essay Resistance & Refusal in Polynesia​.

3/27/2023 Undergrad Creighton Burns published It's not ok to die with dignity in America in volume 13, number 1 of the Journal for Undergraduate Ethnography. 

3/21/2023 Dr. Francisca Yuenki Lai, 2014 Purdue Anthropology PhD, has an article in the January/February 2023 Anthropology News publication, Queering Asian Labor Migration. Her book, Maid to Queer: Asian Labor Migration and Female Same-Sex Desires, details the meanings of same-sex relationships among Indonesian migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong.

3/21/2023 Dr. Amanda Veile and doctoral candidate Valerie Miller were quoted in this new Salon article on "mommy brain" entitled It's time to rethink the narrative behind "mommy brain," scientists say. A new and growing body of scientific research is challenging public narratives around maternal cognition, which often have sexist undertones.

2022

9/21/2022 Ph.D. Student Rebecca-Eli Long and Hannah Quinn (University of Toronto) wrote an essay about consent-as-method for the Disability as Rupture collection recently published in Fieldsights entitled Rupturing “Capacity to Consent”: Toward Anti-Ableist Research Relations.

9/21/2022 Dr. Zoe Nyssa has received an Engagement Scholarship Consortium research grant. This grant will fund an innovative mixed-method social-ecological project in the applied anthropology graduate classes for AY2022-23 (ANTH 640 and ANTH 641) to support community participation in local parks and green space redevelopment processes while improving water quality along the Wabash River, a key Indiana waterway. This project is made possible by a unique collaboration with Dr. Aaron Thompson (Landscape Architecture) and the Purdue Center for Community & Environmental Design (CCED) as well as Bryce Patz, Urban Forestry and Greenspace Administrator for the City of West Lafayette.

9/21/2022 Dr. Zoe Nyssa, Stinchcomb, T. R., Z. Ma published "Complex human-deer interactions challenge conventional management approaches: the need to consider power, trust, and emotion." Ecology and Society, 27(1): 13.

8/3/2022 Dr. Kali Rubaii was interviewed on Democracy Now about the US Senate bill that just got passed to cover healthcare for burn pit exposure in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

8/1/2022 Dr. Andrew Flachs for being a finalist for the Society of Economic Anthropology Kate Browne Creativity in Research Award for a story map project entitled "The Global Lives of Indian Cotton" funded by the CLA-ERHA grant.

7/29/2022 Dr. Amanda Veile and Dr. Erik Otárola-Castillo have published a new article entitled "Household conditions modulate associations between cesarean delivery and childhood growth". Co-authored with Karen Kramer (University of Utah), the article is available in early view at the American Journal of Biological Anthropology website.

5/13/2022 Dr. Dada Docot was the co-organizer and co-presenter (with Dr. Tricia Okada, Tamagawa University) for the virtual roundtable "Filipino Pasts and Futures: Life and Work in Japan" as part of her postdoctoral fellowship at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo.

5/13/2022 Dr. Dada Docot presented as an invited speaker in a roundtable held on April 29, titled “Overseas Filipinos and the Philippine Elections," organized by the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.

5/13/2022 Dr. Dada Docot published an invited piece titled “Dispirited Away: The Peer Review Process" in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review Journal for the journal's relaunch of its "Directions" Section. 

5/13/2022 Dr. Risa Cromer published "Saving: Towards a Feminist Reckoning" in the Feminist Anthropology journal's special issue on Keywords. 

5/13/2022 Dr. Risa Cromer and Rebecca Martinez co-authored "Impact of COVID-19 on People Experiencing Homelessness: A Call for Critical Accountability," a commentary essay with Drs. Natalia Rodriguez and Yumary Ruiz featured in the American Journal of Public Health.  

5/13/2022 Dr. Risa Cromer presented a paper titled "Mark(et)ing Race in US Embryo Adoption" on April 28th in the virtual symposium "Tissue Donations Beyond the Gift of Life" hosted by the White Rose Vital Circulations Network based at the University of Leeds (York and Sheffield) in the UK. 

5/13/2022 Dr. Andrew Flachs was interviewed for the Landscapes podcast about GMOs and sustainable agriculture. 

5/4/2022 Dr. Michele Buzon has published an article entitled “Archaeological site along the Nile opens a window on the Nubian civilization that flourished in ancient Sudan” appearing on The Conversation. Dr. Buzon has worked in the Tombos region of northern Sudan for over 20 years. 

5/3/2022 Congratulations to PhD student Rebecca-Eli Long who was awarded the Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship from the Society for Visual Anthropology for their project "Crafting Autistic Futures." The SVA/Lemelson Foundation Fellowship supports graduate students working in visual and multimodal anthropology in preparing for dissertation research.

4/26/2022 Congratulations to Samuel Bakeis for acheiving the 2022 CLA Outstanding Senior Award!

3/22/2022 Dr. Ian Lindsay has a co-authored report, "The Project ArAGATS Kasakh Valley Archaeological Survey, Armenia: Report of the 2014–2017 Seasons" in the April issue of the American Journal of Archaeology! 

3/22/2022 Dr. Amanda Veile and graduate student Lauren Christopher have published a new paper, "Differences in nutritional status between rural and urban Yucatec Maya children: The importance of early life conditions," in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. This work was conducted with collaborators Ines Varela-Silva, Hugo Azcorra, Federico Dickinson, and Karen Kramer.

2/18/2022 Congratulations to Dr. Kory Cooper, who has been selected as the recipient of the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award for 2021-22! Dr. Cooper is being recognized for his many skills in the classroom, in mentoring undergraduate and graduate students, leadership with the undergraduate program, and all that he does to advance excellence in our department. This award is chosen by the Liberal Arts Educational Excellence Awards Committee and the Dean on the basis of student and faculty nominations, student ratings, teaching and scholarly excellence, and peer evaluation.

2/10/2022 Dr. Dada Docot published in _Commoning Ethnography_ about transnational mutual aid and solidarity during COVID-19 in the Philippines, in her article titled "Carceral and Colonial Memory during Pandemic Times in the Philippines: A Long Letter of Solidarity from the Diaspora." The article is a writeup of Dr. Docot's transnational fundraiser held in Summer 2021. 

2/8/2022 Graduate student Jose Becerra Vera was selected to receive the Michael M. Cernea Involuntary Resettlement Student Travel Award. With funding from this award, Jose will present a working paper at the Society for Applied Anthropology 2022 annual conference titled, "The Political Ecology of Air Pollution: A Case Study of the Inland Empire Region of California."

1/26/2022 Congratulations to graduate student Rebecca-Eli Long on being awarded a 2022 Craft Research Fund Project Grant, for their project, "Crafting Autistic Interests"! This project is part of dissertation research that uses participatory textile-making to explore autistic "special interests" and address narrative injustice. Through giving material form to autistic interests, this project serves as a form of textile politics that highlights the liberatory potential of autistic joy through craft.

1/13/2022 Dr. Laura Zanotti has a new publication out co-authored with Dr. Mangala Subramaniam, "Genesis of the Support Circle"! As the title suggests, the article walks the reader through the development of the Support Circle at Purdue University, which is aimed at faculty, and connects, builds ties, and provides opportunities to share experiences about experiences, stresses, uncertainties, and coping in these times. The goal of the Support Circle is to promote a culture of care on campus and cultivate a space where faculty can share and discuss various aspects of their well-being. Published in the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence and ADVANCE Purdue Center for Faculty Success Working Paper Series 4(2). 

1/12/2022 Dr. Melanie Beasley will be giving a virtual presentation on January 14 "What’s for dinner on the paleomenu? A stable isotope story about fermented meat and maggots" as part of the Seminar Series for the Department of Archaeology at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany.

2021

11/22/2021 Congratulations to Dr. Risa Cromer on her 2022 Global Synergy Research Grant for her project, "Reproductive Righteousness and Far-Right Extremism: Global Feminist Perspectives"! The project examines the increasingly critical role of reproductive politics in right-wing movements and, in particular, the use of appeals around race, immigration, fertility, and demography to confer a ‘righteous’ authority to neo-fascist, neo-patriarchal politics across the globe. Risa and collaborators at Cambridge and Hebrew University launched the Reproductive Righteousness Project in June 2021 by bringing anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, and other feminist scholars of Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, Asia, and Africa into dialogue to collaboratively theorize across national cases toward a more robust analysis of what we call “reproductive righteousness.” The Global Synergy Research Grant will support establishing our international research network with a virtual writing seminar in 2022, creation of an online archive (featuring blogs, videos, podcasts, and other media), and editorial labor for the first publication of our interdisciplinary initiative in a special issue of Women's Studies International Forum.

10/28/2021 Dr. Dada Docot's essay, "Mutlimodal Extractivism," Dr. Docot argues, " the multimodality that many anthropologists applaud for its usefulness and promise also stifles lives. Multimodalities that do not seriously engage with how violence, inequality, racialization, and injustice are perpetuated dangerously reproduce colonialist adventurism and obsessions with charting the unknown and rendering the Other readable and exploitable."

10/22/2021  Dr. Erik Otarola-Castillo and collaborators, including Purdue Department of Anthropology graduate students Melissa Torquato and Trevor Keevil, co-authored a commentary on the importance of transparency for machine and deep learning applications in archaeology. The paper titled “Machine learning, bootstrapping, null models, and why we are still not 100% sure which bone surface modifications were made by crocodiles” is currently in press with the Journal of Human Evolution 

9/22/2021  What is the “savanna landscape effect”? Based on a review of the environmental pressures of savannas on chimpanzees, such as water scarcity, the team of Dr. Stacy Lindshield et al. found evidence that a “savanna landscape effect” shifts the behavior of chimpanzees in hot and dry landscapes.  

9/15/2021    Congratulations to Dr. Ian Lindsay and co-PIs in Computer Science and Research Computing for being awarded a National Science Foundation grant! Using advanced drone imaging technology, the project will build an artificial intelligence-based framework for modeling complex urban constructions from remote sensing and field observations. The research team is part of Purdue’s interdisciplinary ROSETTA initiative housed in the College of Liberal Arts.

9/8/2021  Congratulations to Dr. Zoe Nyssa on being awarded an NSF for the project "Explaining Differential Success in Biodiversity Knowledge Commons"! The project will systematically investigate biodiversity data portals built from a common platform in order to understand portal communities and outcomes.

7/7/2021 Gender Equality in the Arctic is an international collaborative project highlighting the importance of recognition and appreciation of diversity in terms of discourses, gender, indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, governance, education, economies, social realities, sustainability, and balanced participation in leadership and decision making, both in the public and private sectors. The Phase III Arctic Gender Equality Report includes the chapter, "Empowerment and Fate Control," for which Dr. Laura Zanotti is a contributing author, along with Co-PIs Courtney Carothers and Charlene Apok.

6/25/2021  In this video series curated by Dr. Girish Daswani (Anthropology, University of Toronto), Purdue Anthropology faculty Dr. Dada Docot speaks about the carceral and inherited colonial logics surrounding government and public responses to the #CommunityPantryPH mutual aid movement in the Philippines. 

5/19/2021  Rachel Small (Majoring in Anthropology and Communication, Minoring in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality studies) was awarded first place prize at the Purdue Undergrad Research Conference in the category of Archival Presentations for her research talk, "White Feminist Icons: An Intersectional Case Study on Amelia Earhart"!

5/14/2021  Anthropology major Sarah Coon was nominated for the Beinecke Scholarship! The Beinecke Scholarship Program was established in 1971 and seeks to encourage and enable highly motivated students to pursue opportunities available to them and to be courageous in the selection of a graduate course of study in the arts, humanities, or social sciences. Congratulations, Sarah!

5/11/2021  Congratulations to Dr. Riall Nolan, Professor Emeritus of Purdue Anthropology who received the Sol Tax Distinguished Service Award. The award recognizes and honors long-term and exceptional service to the Society. 

5/11/2021  Congratulations to Evelyn Blackwood, Professor Emeritus of Purdue Anthropology who received the Association of Queer Anthropology (AQA) Distinguished Achievement Award for the years 2020 and 2021. The Distinguished Achievement Award honors outstanding contributions to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer anthropology through scholarship, research, teaching, mentoring, service, public engagement, and/or activism. 

5/3/2021  Brandi Wren, a research affiliate for the department of anthropology was studying social distancing and infections before social distancing became the new normal. Social grooming in the animal kingdom is common and serves several functions, from removing ectoparasites to maintaining social bonds between conspecifics. We examined whether time spent grooming with others in a highly social mammal species was associated with infection status for gastrointestinal parasites. 

4/15/2021  Congratulations to Dr. Jennifer Johnson, who has been selected as a recipient of the Kenneth T. Kofmehl Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award for 2020-21! This award is one of the top teaching awards in our College. Winners are nominated by departments and chosen by the Liberal Arts Educational Excellence Awards Committee and the Dean on the basis of student and faculty nominations, student ratings, teaching and scholarly excellence, and peer evaluation. We are so pleased that Dr. Johnson's talents and contributions to students are recognized, especially the positive and important impact of her teaching during these very difficult times. Congratulations, Dr. Johnson!

4/6/2021  Jenail Marshall has been selected by the African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue as a 2021 Remmers Award winner! The award was established in memory of Dr. H. H. Remmers, Head of the Division of Educational Reference and member of the Psychology Department and recognizes academic excellence and scholarly promise among social science and interdisciplinary studies graduate students. Congratulations, Jenail!

3/25/2021   Dr. Andrew Flachs has been selected as a College of Liberal Arts Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher for 2020-2021!  The award is chosen from among nominations submitted by departments to the Liberal Arts Educational Excellence Awards Committee and the Dean on the basis of student and faculty nominations, student ratings, teaching and scholarly excellence, and peer evaluation. Congratulations, Dr. Flachs!

3/9/2021  Congratulations to Dr. Melissa Remis, who has received the Violet Haas Award by the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence! The Violet Haas Award recognizes individuals, programs, or departments at Purdue that have effectively facilitated the advancement of women in hiring, promotion, education, and salary, or have generally enhanced a positive professional climate for women at Purdue.

3/7/2021  The Sudanese American Medical Association sponsored an international webinar this month in which Professor Emerita Ellen Gruenbaum gave a talk, “Achieving Abandonment: Law and the process of change in Sudan and other countries” in a session with two Sudanese colleagues on the theme of “No Time for Global Inaction:  Unite, Fund, and Act to End Female Genital Mutilation.”

2/12/2021  Congratulations to grad student Jose Becerra whose project, "Trade-off’s Between the Logistics Economy and Community Health: Disproportionate Exposure to Air Pollution Among Marginalized Communities in the Inland Empire" has been selected for the 2021 Halperin Memorial Fund Award!

1/25/2021 Online science magazine Flip Science featured the case of rapid cremations in the Philippines during COVID-19 and its links with colonial sanitation regimes, drawing from interviews with Purdue cultural anthropologist Dada Docot and forensic anthropologist Matthew C. Go, following up on their recent editorial that appeared on Forensic Science International: Synergy. 

1/9/2021  In "Fire and fear: Rapid cremations in the Philippines amidst COVID-19" just released in Forensic Science International: Synergy, Dr. Dada Docot with co-author Dr. Matthew Go consider how recent regulations in the Philippines requiring expeditious cremations for COVID-19 victims is disruptive where burning the dead is largely taboo. Using forensic science and cultural anthropology, they consider culturally appropriate possibilities for honoring the dead.

1/7/2021  Grad student Kari A. Guilbault, who is studying bioarchaeology, has a photo collection, Sticks and Stones, in Unearthed, an online literary journal from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Guilbault uses photography to capture the interconnectedness between nature and humans

1/4/2021  Congratulations to Dr. Laura Zanotti for winning National Science Foundation support for the project, “CNH2-L: Using Sound to Advance Conceptual Frameworks of Resilience of Integrated Grassland-Pastoralist Systems” where she serves as co-PI!  

1/4/2021  Dr. Jennifer Johnson has been selected to participate in a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation leadership program! 2020

11/20/20  Andrew Flachs has just been awarded a Just Tech Covid-19 Rapid-Response grant from the Social Science Research Council for his project, "Technological Transitions in the US Local Food System in Response to Covid-19"! This project explores the digital infrastructures of risk, food access, and growing power built as the local food system transitions to online supply chains during the pandemic.  Congratulations, Dr. Flachs!

11/2/2020  Congratulations to Samuel Bakeis on being awarded a Purdue Student Service-Learning Grant Program for Community Service/Service Learning for the project, "Archival Activities with the Tippecanoe County Historical Association"! During the 1970s and '80s frequent excavations were conducted at Fort Ouiatenon, and photo slides, site maps, and notes stored at the TCHA. Samuel's project will consist of replacing deteriorating slide sleeves, organizing physical artifacts in an improved manner, and digitalizing a large sum of this information so that future research can be done. Congratulations, Samuel!  

10/28/2020  We are proud to announce that Jennifer Lee Johnson, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Purdue University, has been selected to participate in one of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s leadership programs. These programs connect changemakers across the country—from every profession and field—to learn from and work with one another in creating more just and thriving communities

Specifically, Dr. Johnson was selected for Interdisciplinary Research Leaders. Designed for teams of two researchers and one community leader, Interdisciplinary Research Leaders supports teams for three years as they work with their communities to design and conduct rigorous research to explore critical issues, then apply the findings in real-time to advance health and equity.

As a member of the program’s newest cohort, Dr. Johnson will focus on environmental contamination and community health in Martinsville, Indiana. While this community is exceptional in many ways, it is increasingly reflective of broader regional trends, especially with respect to pervasive exposures to toxic chemicals and rising rates of cancer and poverty. By engaging multiple methodological approaches and a range of community members, the overall goal of Johnson’s project is to improve how information on exposure risk is produced, consumed and put to use to motivate meaningful improvements in health outcomes and health equity in Martinsville and beyond.

10/26/2020  Dr. Kali Rubaii was recently interviewed for Voices of the Middle East and North Africa (on KPFA Radio) about her recently published article on the toxic legacy of war in Iraq. 

10/23/2020  In a recent article in Frontiers in Political Science, Professor Emeritus Richard Blanton et al consider commonalities in the collapse of the Roman Empire, China's Ming Dynasty, India's Mughal Empire, and the Venetian Republic using Collective Action Theory. These governments "illustrate a moral bond between citizen and leadership that is inherent where there is joint production. Moral failure of the leadership in this social setting brings calamity because the state's lifeblood—its citizen-produced resource-base—is threatened when there is loss of confidence in the state, which brings in its wake social division, strife, flight, and a reduced motivation to comply with tax obligations." 

10/21/2020  Recently Dr. Melissa Remis and Dr. Carolyn Jost Robinson (Ph.D. 2012) published an article in the Smithsonian Magazine about their research emphasizing the importance of thinking about the ways in which our lives are bound up with the other species around us, how large mammals have and continue to shape our environment and the need to collaborate with local communities for planning effective conservation policies that take into account local knowledge and lifeways. 

10/16/2020  Dr. Risa Cromer recently published ‘Which Lives Matter? Pro-Life Politics during a Pandemic’ in Medical Anthropology Quarterly’s Critical Issues series focused on the upcoming election. The essay examines what pro-life has come to mean during a pandemic by tracing the racist violence of its rhetoric in American politics.

10/13/2020  Dr. Andrew Flachs is featured in CHE- Center for Culture, History, and Environment. Farmers Living and Dying by Cotton Seeds in India is an excerpt from Dr. Flach's book Cultivating Knowledge, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with farmers growing genetically modified and organic cotton in Telangana, India.

9/30/2020  In "'Our family picture is a little hint of heaven': race, religion and selective reproduction in US 'embryo adoption'", Dr. Risa Cromer makes a case for how race and religion intersect to shape how white evangelical users of assisted and selective reproduction technologies use them. The article is published in the November 2020 issue of Reproductive Medicine and Society Online, a special issue resulting from a two-year workshop led by Rayna Rapp and Séverine Mathieu. 

9/3/2020  Congratulations to Dr. Stacy Lindshield and the team on their NSF grant for the project, "Collaborative Research: The Ecological Basis of Hunting and Meat Sharing in Female Savanna Chimpanzees"!

Description and team members:  Sexual selection theory and patterns of male-biased hunting and meat-eating for chimpanzees, some of our closest living relatives, have been traditionally integrated with models of human behavioral evolution. However, tool use and female-biased hunting are characteristics of savanna chimpanzees in Senegal. Hunting with tools may enable these females to routinely ingest and share meat on a seasonal basis without the need for being provisioned by males. This project precisely captures the effect of hunting with tools on diet and compares the weight of these findings to the causes and consequences of male-biased trends that characterize most chimpanzee groups studied today. This interdisciplinary study is a part of the HUNTRESS project on HUnting, Nutrition, Tool-use, Reproductive Ecology, and meat Sharing in Savanna chimpanzees to holistically assess female-biased hunting.

The HUNTRESS team combines behavioral, isotopic, nutritional, genetic, visual analytic, and geographic approaches to compare hunting and meat ingestion between females and males, and in relation to climate and food availability. This project increases capacity for chimpanzee research in Senegal by fully engaging with and supporting local partners and students. Furthermore, it is part of a long-term program that supports habitat preservation in Senegal for the critically-endangered western chimpanzee.

Members of this team also include Papa Ibnou Ndiaye (Université Cheikh Anta Diop), Jill Pruetz (Texas State University), Elizabeth Flaherty (Purdue University), Amy Reibman (Purdue University) and Leslie Knapp (University of Utah).

8/31/2020  Elephants, Hunters, and Others: Integrating Biological Anthropology and Multispecies Ethnography in a Conservation Zone, by Melissa Remis and Carolyn A. Jost Robinson (Purdue PhD 2012) is published in the September issue of American Anthropologist.  The article integrates biological, multispecies and sociocultural approaches with a focus on shared ecologies of BaAka elephant hunters, African forest elephants and others along elephant trails in the Congo Basin.  The authors highlight the ways elephants shape forest structure and the fabric of existence for the people that live there.  They explore the consequences of conservation zoning that restricts forest community access to the trails, resources and social networks in order to develop more culturally relevant and collaborative conservation practices.
Above photo left: Melissa Remis, photo provided by Purdue News, Above photo right: Caroline Jost Robinson, photo provided by Caroline. Photo Below: African Forest Elephants. Photo provided by Caroline Jost Robinson.

8/31/2020  Dr. Andrew Flachs tells the global story of Indian cotton including contributions from researchers based in India, the US, and Europe. This interactive Story Map includes archaeological, historical, and ethnographic elements spanning the origins of cotton farming to the impacts of genetically modified crops to the secondhand clothing industry, and accompanies Flachs' new book Cultivating knowledge: Biotechnology, sustainability, and the human cost of cotton capitalism in India

8/18/2020  Congratulations to Dr. Laura Zanotti and Dr. Risa Cromer on their 2020 Enabling Inclusion at Purdue grants! These awards are made to project proposals that further the Butler Center’s goals to foster a climate of inclusion for faculty, particularly for women and underrepresented minorities.

“Next Steps – Environment Justice, Climate Change, and Racial Justice," Laura Zanotti (principal investigator) with C4E, PCCRC, AAARCC, the Honors College, SIS, and the NAECC as Co-PIs.

“Data Promises and Perils in the Time of COVID: Critical Data Studies Teach-Ins and Syllabus Project for Enabling Inclusion at Purdue," Faithe Day (principal investigator) with Risa and the Critical Data Studies Collective (which I am a member of) are Co-PIs

7/31/2020  In pursuit of creativity, Anthropologists are writing in new genres during COVID. Dr. Kali Rubaii is one of the contributors to American Ethnologist's  "Post-Covid Fantasies", edited by Catherine Besteman, Heath Cabot, and Barak Kalir. 

7/13/2020 As part of AAA's 2020 Webinar series on "Game-Changing Job Search Strategies as an Applied Anthropologist - A Four-Part Webinar Series" , Drs. Sherylyn Briller and Amy Goldmacher, along with Elizabeth K. Briody (Cultural Keys LLC) and others participated in "Part 1: Get Hired! Showcase Your Unique Value" on July 9. The information from the webinar should be posted on the AAA website with the Resources and Webinar Recording by midweek, if not sooner.

Purdue graduate students or alumni will be participating in the following:

Part 2: 5 Secrets for Building Networks that Lead to Jobs

Thursday, July 16
1 p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT
Presenters: Elizabeth K. Briody (Cultural Keys), Ann Reed (Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield), Elizabeth Wirtz (U.S. Dept. of Veterans Affairs and Purdue alumna), Beth Holland (University of North Texas) and Keith Kellersohn (Wicomico Co. Board of Education)

Part 3: This Is Not Your Parents' Resume: New Ways to Tell Your Story

Thursday, July 23
1 p.m. EDT/10 a.m. PDT
Presenters: Dawn Lehman (Pathways21), Ingrid Ramón Parra (Purdue University), William Tyner (National Geographic), and Adam Gamwell (Missing Link Studios)

7/6/2020  Dr. Holly Okonkwo has received the 2020-21 American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, for her book project, "Liberatory Code: Black women and the Politics of Computing". In this project, Dr. Okonkwo ethnographically explores the experiences of Black women technologists in the U.S, their techno-social innovations and how they navigate and negotiate complex issues of race, gender, community and marginalization, to cultivate and imagine liberatory futures for themselves. AAUW Fellows are selected on the basis of scholarly excellence, quality and originality of project design, and active commitment to helping women and girls through service in their communities, professions, or fields of research.

6/22/2020  Congratulations to graduate student Valerie Miller and advisor Dr. Amanda Veile on their recent publication, "Assessment of attention in biological mothers using the attention network test - revised"! The publication, co-authored with Lisa A. VanWormer, appears in Current Psychology. This is the first study to investigate the effects of biological motherhood on attention network functioning.

6/3/2020  Congratulations to Kamryn Dehn (College of Liberal Arts, College of Agriculture, and the Honors College, majoring in anthropology and aquatic sciences) on receiving the 2020 Tyler Trent Courage and Resilience Award!

"Scholarship recipients embody Tyler’s legacy by rising above hardship, turning it into something positive, and continuing to seek their passions. Dehn made a particular impression on [Mitch] Daniels and the selection committee in the way she used her personal challenges to create positive and lasting change in the lives of those around her." 

5/21/2020  Dr. Erik Otarola-Castillo and graduate student Melissa Torquato’s paper published in the Annual Reviews of Anthropology, titled “Bayesian Statistics in Archaeology”, is featured as a Notable Writing in the latest volume of “The Best Writing on Mathematics 2019”. This annual anthology, published by Princeton University Press, brings together the year’s finest mathematics writing from around the world.

5/20/20 In a recent publication in Cultural Anthropology Dr. Kali Rubaii explores how people find trust to overcome issues during situations of crisis even when they have no knowledge of one another’s motives in TRUST WITHOUT CONFIDENCE: Moving Medicine with Dirty Hands

5/19/2020  Congratulations to Diana Quintero and Kamryn Dehn for the earning 1st place prize for best poster presentation in the College of Liberal Arts at the virtual Purdue Undergraduate Research Conference. Diana and Kamryn presented on "Male vs. Female Representation in Chimpanzee Behavioral Studies" as part of an ongoing study with Dr. Stacy Lindshield on feminist perspectives in primatology.

5/14/2020  Congratulations to Dr. Holly Okonkwo! She has been awarded a 2020 Summer Faculty Grant from the Purdue Research Foundation for her research project titled, "Liberatory Code: Race, Gender and the Politics of Computing"! Funding from this grant support Dr. Okonkwo in completing her current book manuscript.

5/14/2020  Alumna Franco Lai's (PhD 2014) first book, based on her PhD dissertation, is coming out from @hkupress in December 2020! Maid to Queer is the first book about Asian female migrant workers who develop same-sex relationships in a host city. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with Indonesian domestic workers in Hong Kong, the book explores the meanings of same-sex relationships to these migrant women. Congrats, Franco! 

5/11/2020  Congratulations to Dr. Risa Cromer on being awarded a 2020 Summer Faculty Grant from the Purdue Research Foundation for her research project titled, "Ex Utero: Frozen Embryo Politics in the United States"! This funding will support Dr. Cromer in completing her current book manuscript. 

5/7/2020  Purdue Alumnus magazine has a feature article including Dr. Michele Buzon and Dr. Laura Zanotti, who share what it takes to do their field research and why it matters! 

5/7/2020  Graduate student, Gideon Singer is part of a team at Datastory that has created a GIS Map Layer with their partners Spatial A.I. The map shows social sentiment regarding COVID-19 in each county of the US. Gideon's experience researching social media during his Ph.D. gave him the idea to generate word clouds based on social media data. He was then able to use the Python scripting language to automate a word-cloud that took the shape of each respective county as long as there were 50 or more post in the last week.

4/30/2020  Congratulations to Dr. Zoe Nyssa and Dr. Risa Cromer on a recent publication! Along with collaborator Jessica Hardin, they have recently published a short essay in the _Journal for the Anthropology of North America’s_ ‘Coming to Terms’ series. In it they grapple with "saving"as a practice common to their respective field sites, our discipline, and the world. While written just before the CoVID pandemic was recognized as a global crisis, the authors are noticing that calls to save are ever louder and more regular. 

4/29/2020  Dr. Melanie Beasley's Forensic Anthropology class is featured in this month's CLA THiNK Magazine! This class provides students with a real-world perspective on death investigation and even provides hands-on skeletal activities to experience what a professional forensic anthropologist might analyze in a lab. #AnthOfTomorrow #ForensicAnthro #anth215forensics

4/23/2020  Congratulations to graduate student Jenail Marshall on being awarded a 2020 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship! The NSF GRFP provides 3 years of funding towards her project, "Bioarchaeological investigations of human-microbial interaction in East Africa"

4/19/2020 Congratulations to Amanda Waller who has been awarded The Boilers Work internship. Only 10 graduate students at Purdue receive this stipend internship. This program is intended to help students garner real-world work experience, refine soft-skills, and establish career connections prior to graduation. Upon return, program participants are required to facilitate one professional development workshop to share their experiences and insights.

4/16/2020  Congratulations to Elizabeth Kriebel, who has been accepted to a graduate program in Museum and Field Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder! She has been awarded a GA-ship to work at the campus museum while she pursues studies towards her master's. Congratulations, Elizabeth!

4/16/2020  Congratulations to Sarah Huang on her recent publication! Sarah's chapter, "Food from Home and Food from Here: Disassembling Locality in Local Food Systems with Refugees and Immigrants in Anchorage, Alaska" has been published in the book, The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America edited by Julian Agyeman and Sydney Giacalone. 

4/14/2020  Emerita Dr. Ellen Gruenbaum just published “Debating Deinfibulation: "Why Some Women Resist the WHO Advice and What Clinicians and Researchers Can Do” in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.   The article draws on not only Dr. Gruenbaum's own research but also the important work being done by other scholars in this area of interest, who are trying to shape a more humane and informed responses to FGC and those who are living with its aftermath.

4/9/2020  Congratulations to Liz Hall and Savannah Schulze on being awarded a Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship! Liz will be writing up her project entitled, "Zoonotic Risks at the Human-Primate Interface: Behavior, Nutritional Status, and Immune Function in a Food Insecure Central African Forest Reserve." Savannah will be writing up her project entitled, "Forest People without a forest: Shifting Batwa Identity on the Fringes of Global Conservation Spaces, Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda."

4/8/2020  Graduate student Gideon Singer is working as a GIS Specialist with Datastory. Their team worked together to curate and visualize various COVID-19 resources to make available to the public. Storytelling with maps is a major part of Gideon's work with Datastory. Updated everyday, they have created the Case Tracker WebMap that shows the amount of COVID-19 cases per county.

3/25/2020  Congratulations to Dr. Risa Cromer, who has been selected to participate in the Society for Family Planning Wiki Scholars Program cohort this summer from June-August, 2020. The 2020 SFP Wiki Scholars Program is a partnership between the Society of Family Planning and Wiki Education. Wikipedia is one of the most popular sources of information, including information about abortion and contraception. Building the capacity of family planning researchers to ensure this powerful tool connects the public with up-to-date and accurate information is an exciting opportunity. Through this program, the cohort will become fluent in Wikipedia's tools, adding to already-existing articles, and potentially creating new ones.

2/24/2020  A short piece published by Dr. Jennifer Johnson in the edited volume, An Ecotopian Lexicon, was recently mentioned in a stunning review of the collection as a whole in The New Yorker! The contribution introduces the Luganda interjection, gyebale, thank you for the work you do, a term used as a greeting, a goodbye, or simply as an acknowledgment of the ongoing work of others, exchanged between friends, colleagues, and non-familiars alike. For Hua Hsu, author of the New Yorker review, gyebale also "suggest[s] a kind of communal ethos baked into how two strangers might regard each other.” Congratulations, Dr. Johnson!

1/29/2020  Assistant professor of anthropology Melanie Beasley was invited to serve as an isotope expert at a forensic workshop hosted by the International Committee of the Red Cross in South Africa. Thousands of migrants die each year along perilous routes in Africa and beyond, many without identification. The workshop is a collaborative humanitarian effort to help determine how stable isotope methods can be implemented to help identify migrants who die each year. 

1/6/2020  Congratulations to Dr. Dada Docot on her recent publication, "Taking the Long Route: Ethnographic Metacommentary as Method in the Anthropological Film Practice," Current Anthropology 60, no. 6 (December 2019): 774-795. In this article, Dr. Docot introduces “ethnographic metacommentary,” an experiential, processual, and protracted approach to ethnography, and shows how ethnographic metacommentary is a productive thought process that fleshes out ruptures in the filmmaking process that are often concealed from the audience, and even from the filmmakers.

2019

12/12/2019  Laura Zanotti with Presence to Influence team members Dorothy Hogg (Northwestern University) and Emily Colon (University of Maryland) joined thousands in Madrid, Spain, to conduct collaborative event ethnography at the 2019 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change COP25 meetings. Many thanks to the Purdue Climate Change Research Center in providing the credentials.

12/6/2019 Andrew Flachs has been awarded an Enhancing Research in the Humanities and Arts grant for the research project, “The Interactive Story Map of the Cotton Commodity Chain.” This project will combine spatial data with interactive media and first-hand accounts to illuminate the cotton commodity chain through a free, online Story Map. Congratulations, Dr. Flachs!  

12/6/19 Erik Otárola-Castillo has been awarded a Global Synergy Research Grant for Faculty for the research project, “Climate Change Effects on the Migration and Subsistence Patterns of the First South Americans.” This project is a growing collaboration between Dr. Otárola-Castillo, Dr. Amanda Veile, Dr. Francesca Fernandini (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), and municipal leadership in the province of Cañete in Lima, Peru to shed light on the initial migration patterns of the first human colonizers of the New World. Congratulations, Dr. Otárola-Castillo!

12/5/19 Valerie Miller has been awarded a Global Synergy Research Grant for Students for the research project, “Mothering with Others in Dominica: Effects of Allomaternal Support on Maternal Attention and Stress!" This biocultural project will take place in Dominica and will address the relationships and interactions between mothers' stress, attentiveness, emotional well-being, and social support. It will investigate how allomothering behaviors affect maternal well-being. Results will reveal the ways in which maternal psychology is shaped by biological and sociocultural influences. Congratulations, Valerie!

12/4/2019 Congratulations to Erik Otárola-Castillo on being awarded an Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences grant for his research project, “Were Humans Responsible for the First Mammal Mass Extinctions in North America 13,000 Years Ago?” This project applies quantitative techniques developed by Otárola-Castillo and collaborators to determine whether humans created the marks on the bones of several North American mammoth, mastodon, and other megafauna during hunting and butchery. Results will enhance our understanding of the interactions between humans and Pleistocene age megafauna.

12/4/2019 Congratulations to Andrew Flachs on being awarded an Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences grant for his research project, “Comfort Foods: Biocultural Diversity and Community Resilience in Rural Bosnia.” This project will ask how the rural Bosnian community is adapting agrarian management traditions to support foodways and montane biodiversity as it rebuilds from the 1990s war, adjusts to high unemployment, and grapples with climate change.

12/3/2019 Michele Buzon has been awarded a Global Synergy Research Grant for Faculty for the research project, “Foreign and Indigenous Contributions to the Development of Christianity in Medieval Nubia.”  This project aims to provide new data on the origins of the Christian church in Nubia and the processes of conversion in the local communities via the analysis of markers of geographic identity (strontium isotope analysis) and cultural identity (burial practices and other artifacts). Congratulations, Dr. Buzon!

11/11/2019  Holly Okonkwo studies how race, gender, and place affect the experiences of women scientists and technologists of color. Holly Okonkwo, applied anthropologist has worked with women in both the U.S. and Africa to gain a sense of their place within the science community. 

10/25/2019  Dada Docot, Assistant Professor of Anthropology will be presenting at UCLA, Center for Southeast Asian Studies on Friday, November. 

10/23/19  Stacy Lindshield is giving a talk entitled "Nutritional Ecology of Savanna Chimpanzees at Fongoli, Senegal" on October 23rd at the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies at Rutgers University. Her presentation is a part of the 3rd Annual Lembersky Conference on Advances in Primate Nutritional Ecology, Health, and Energetics.

10/23/2019  On October 30th, Dr. Otarola-Castillo, Dr. Amanda Veile, and the Cerro de Oro Archaeological Project (PACO) are collaborating with the Universidad Nacional de Cañete, the Provincial Municipality of Cañete, and the District Municipality of San Luis to conduct a community-training event titled “Cerro de Oro - A thousand years of Buried History”. This will be a small symposium where Cañete students will receive training results of the most recent discoveries from Cerro de Oro for interpretation to their communities.

10/22/2019  Andrew Flachs’ book , Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, sustainability, and the human cost of cotton capitalism in India, illuminates the local impact of global changes: the slow, persistent dangers of pesticides, inequalities in rural life, the aspirations of people who grow fibers sent around the world, the place of ecological knowledge in modern agriculture, and even the complex threat of suicide. It all begins with a seed.
Update 1/29/2020 : Assistant professor of anthropology Andrew Flachs has received significant notice tied to his book, Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India (University of Arizona Press, 2019). The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork with farmers growing genetically modified and organic cotton in Telangana, India. Andrew investigated the human responses to global agrarian change, including the dangers of pesticides, inequalities in rural life, the aspirations of people who grow fibers sent around the world, the place of ecological knowledge in modern agriculture, and even the complex threat of suicide. His work has been recognized globally.

10/22/2019  Our new faculty member, Dr. Risa Cromer, has won a Wenner-Gren Foundation Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship to support the writing of her book, Ex Utero: Frozen Embryo Politics in the United States, next year! The Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship is awarded to anthropologists in the earlier stages of their careers to support a new generation of scholars in devoting themselves full-time to writing.This fellowship is part of the Wenner-Gren Foundation’s mission to “support the publication of significant works that promise to make a solid contribution to the field and beyond.” 

10/16/2019  Dr. Erik Otarola-Castillo and Dr. Amanda Veile recently met in Cañete, Peru with the municipal leadership of the Cañete province, and Dr. Francesca Fernandini Parodi (PUCP; PI of Cerro de Oro, San Luis), to develop a collaborative archaeology and culture heritage project centered on engagement with community members, their archaeological training, and support for local archaeological education and preservation.

8/26/2019  Congratulations to Michele Buzon for winning a grant from the National Science Foundation! Michele plans to investigate the impact of climate change on the isotopic signature of available strontium during the last ~4,000 years within the Nile River Valley.

8/26/2019   Five proposals out of 25 have been selected for funding in the Education Ecosystem sector of Purdue's Integrative Data Science Initiative. Principal Investigator Nicole Kong, Libraries, School of Information Studies, and her team of investigators are one of the five winning proposals. Ian Lindsay, Associate Professor of Anthropology served as one of the Co investigators for this research. The award is called “Integrating Geospatial Information Across Disciplines” this will be used to develop a GIS graduate certificate in the coming year.

8/22/2019  Michele Buzon started working at the archaeological site Tombos in modern-day Sudan while she was still a graduate student. She and a collaborator, Stuart Tyson Smith from the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been excavating the Nubian site since 2000. 

8/22/19  Evelyn Blackwood, professor Emeritus published an article in the Washington Post. This piece draws on her upcoming book, “Dreams of a New World: Bay Area Lesbian Histories” 

8/6/2019 - PhD Candidate Katie Whitmoreand Professor Michele Buzon have recently published an article in the International Journal of Paleopathology  that focuses two individuals from the archaeological site of Tombos who lived with a form of dwarfism.

7/26/2019 - We’re excited to introduce six new Concentrations in several specialty areas within the Anthropology major! 

7/26/2019 - Congratulations to Alison Kirkham (MS 2018) who has been selected as the recipient of the 2019 College of Liberal Arts Master’s Non-Thesis Award for her project titled, “That’s Disgusting: Perceptions of Arthropods and the Categorization of Insects as (In)edible in the United States.” The award recognizes individuals whose work reflects distinguished scholarship and research at the master’s level.

Alison is currently the Head of Marketing and Research with the Rocky Mountain Micro Ranch in Denver, Colorado.This small start-up farms and processes insects for human consumption both locally and at an international level. Alison assesses customer perceptions, needs, and purchasing habits, as well as helps the farming aspect become more efficient.

7/11/2019 - Congratulations to Dr. H. Kory Cooper, Matthew Pike, and Garett Hunt on their recent publication in the Journal of Archaeological Science. In "Defining a ‘reasonable geographic framework’: Path Distance as native copper provenance in the Arctic, Subarctic, and Northwest Coast"

7/03/2019 - The Zanotti lab welcomes Eduardo Rafael Galvão, Maria Gabriela Fink Salgado, Pat-i Kayapó, and Laura Torrejano as visiting scholars this fall semester. A special thanks to the Honors College for inviting Pat-i to be a scholar in residence. They will be working on projects in Colombia and Brazil on socioenvironmental impacts of artisinal mining, community-led art and media initiatives, and sustainable solar in low electricity environments. We welcome them to the department!

4/17/2019 - Purdue Anthropology alumni, Dr. Sarah Schrader has just published a book based in part on her dissertation. Activity, Diet and Social Practice: Addressing Everyday Life in Human Skeletal Remains

3/21/19 – "Amanda Veile, an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, and her team report that indigenous mothers in farming communities in Yucatán, Mexico, breastfeed for about 1.5 months longer following cesarean deliveries than they do following vaginal deliveries. Veile believes this is possible because the mothers live in an exceptionally supportive breastfeeding environment."

3/19/2019 - Congratulations to Laura Zanotti and colleagues on facilitating Purdue to receive a Sigrid Rausing Trust Foundation Grant. This work will support workshops with indigenous leaders in the Brazilian Amazon and travel to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change COP25 in Santiago, Chile.

2/28/2019 - Dr. Andrew Flachs studies the roots of anxiety and aspiration in Indian farmer's GM seed choices in a new paper with American Anthropologist and Purdue Today.

2/14/2019 - Congratulations to Isabelle Ortt, who has been selected as the recipient of the O Michael Watson Outstanding Senior Award! She is completing an Honors thesis on skeletal remains with Dr. Michele Buzon.

2/14/2019 – Congratulations to Baylee Bunce for becoming a Fulbright U.S. Student Program Semi-finalist. Baylee graduated with honors in our Anthropology class of 2018. 

2/12/2019 – Dr. Andrew Flachs work is featured in American Anthropologist. Planting and Performing: Anxiety, Aspiration, and “Scripts” in Telangana Cotton Farming

2/12/20109 - Dr. Amanda Veile has co-authored a new paper in the "American Journal of Human Biology," which examines rising cesarean birth rates, and their relation to childhood infectious disease, in a South American indigenous population, the Argentine Qom.
"Birth mode and infectious morbidity risks in Qom children of Argentina"

2/12/2019 - Dr. Amanda Veile authored a new paper in the "American Journal of Human Biology" with Sydney Tuller, a second-year master's degree student in Anthropology. The article examines the relationships between rising cesarean birth rates, prolonged breastfeeding practices and childhood infectious disease in indigenous Mexican subsistence farmers, the Yucatec Maya. 
"Birth mode, breastfeeding and childhood infectious morbidity in the Yucatec Maya” 

2/12/2019 - Dr. Amanda Veile authored a new article in the "Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science” with Valerie Miller, a PhD student in Anthropology. The article summarizes theoretical literature on breastfeeding practices throughout human evolutionary history.
"Duration of Breast Feeding in Ancestral Environments"

2018

12/18/2018-The Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships featured Dr. Ian Lindsay for his research using drone technology in their Dimensions of Discovery announcements. 

12/5/2018- Congratulations to  Michele Buzon who was awarded a 2018-19 Exploratory Social Sciences Research Grant for her project “Pluralistic Identities in "Nubia: A Bioarchaeological Examination of Entanglements at Post-Colonial Tombos".

12/5/2018- Congratulations to Amanda Veile who was awarded a 2018-19 Global Synergy Research for Faculty grant for her research project entitled, “Urbanization, Migration and Indigenous Health in Peru”. 

12/5/2018- Purdue Today reports on Andrew Flach's research, Young hip farmers: Coming to a city near you including his research in the journal Rural Society.

11/7/18- Andrew Flachs uses tools from GIS and ethnography to map the last two decades of small and alternative agriculture across the United States in the journal Rural Sociology.

11/7/2018- New research from Andrew Flachs explains why the same Indian farmers end up making very different decisions about GM cotton, conventional rice, and heirloom vegetables seeds in the Journal of Agrarian Change.

11/05/2018 - Laura Zanotti is giving a talk entitled “Indigenous Rights in the Anthropocene” on November 7th at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. This event is co-sponsored by the Native American Studies Program, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of History, Environmental Studies Program, and Africana & Latin American Studies Program.

10/25/2018 - On October 26, 2018, Ellen Gruenbaum presents the keynote lecture on “Tensions and Movements: Female Genital Cutting in the Global North and South, Then and Now” for the 9th FOKO Conference in Åkerberg, Höör, Sweden. FOKO is a regular conference of Nordic researchers who work on the topic of FGC, and this year it is sponsored by the Centre for Sexology and Sexuality Studies at Malmö University and the Forum for Africa Studies at Uppsala University. Following the conference, Gruenbaum presents a lecture at Uppsala University on “What Can Medical Anthropology Contribute to the Field of Global Reproductive Health?” for the International Maternal and Child Health program at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, in collaboration with the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life, and Welfare.

10/25/2018- Stacy Lindshield and her collaborators received a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Great Ape Conservation Fund to investigate novel pathways for mercury bioaccumulation in Senegalese chimpanzees. This transdisciplinary and applied research project aims to understand how the mercury released from gold mining moves through savanna ecosystems and potentially impacts critically-endangered chimpanzees living near mining communities. Dr. Lindshield works with colleagues from Ball State University, North Dakota State University, USDA Forest Service, Université Chiekh Anta Diop, and the University of Minnesota.

10/18/2018 - Congratulations to Dr. Laura Zanotti for receiving the Purdue University Faculty Scholar Award! This award recognizes faculty members “who are on an accelerated path for academic distinction." Dr. Zanotti was selected for her high profile work as an environmental anthropologist and interdisciplinary social scientist.

10/16/2018 - PhD student, Melissa Torquato (Otarola-Castillo) won the 2018 College of Liberal Arts Master's Thesis Award (non-thesis). Her Master’s project, titled “Why do we farm?: A comparative assessment of the foraging-farming transition”, examined the effects of climate on food security & risk management during the prehistoric foraging-farming transition in the North American Midwest.

10/15/2018 - To celebrate our 10 years as an independent department on campus, we hosted two days of enriching and thought-provoking conversation, collaboration, and connection. Since our department's beginnings in 2008, we have made great leaps to encourage deeper thinking about a variety of topics related to the human experience. To celebrate this milestone we hosted a symposium to enhance and continue these conversations, with presentations from our graduate students, thoughtful discussion surrounding the future of the discipline and the department, and a keynote by Nina Jablonski. 

10/9/2018 - Andrew Flachs recently published an article that explores how we measure the impact of Genetically Modified crops in India in the journal Science & Technology Studies. 

9/27/2018 Graduate student Sarah Huang recently presented her research titled "Amidst Rice Production: Conversations in Farmers' Food Security in An Giang Province, Vietnam" at An Giang University's The International Workshop on Water Governance, Climate Change and Food Security in Minority Communities, Vietnam.

9/27/2018 Dr. Stacy Lindshield recently chaired the special symposium “Understanding Savanna Chimpanzees” at the International Primatological Society Biannual Congress on August 20, 2018 held at the United Nations Office of Nairobi, Kenya.

9/25/2018- Congratulations to Dr. Laura Zanotti on being recently named a University Faculty Scholar. The University Faculty Scholars Program recognizes outstanding faculty members at the West Lafayette campus who are on an accelerated path for academic distinction. Eligible faculty must hold the rank of tenured associate or full professor and have been in that rank for no more than five years.

9/20/2018 Isabelle Ortt has been awarded the Office of Undergraduate Research Scholarship for 2018-19.  She will work with Dr. Michele Buzon on the demographic and paleopathological analysis of people buried in a tomb at Tombos.

7/18/2018 Dr. Laura Zanotti recently shared what tools she carries in the field in a recent issue of Anthropology News titled "What's in Your Bag, Anthropologists?"

7/12/2018 Dr. Melissa Remis' research on the variation in gorilla foraging ecology and its implications for understanding the evolution of primate diets was recently highlighted in the July issue of Scientific American titled "The Real Paleo Diet".

4/26/18   Dr. Jennifer Johnson presented at the Rachel Carson Center for the Environment and Society in München, Germany.  Dr. Johnson received a Carson Writing Fellowship and was invited to present at the Rachel Carsen Center on April 19, 2018.

4/24/2018  Amanda Veile and collaborator Karen Rosenberg organized a symposium "The Evolutionary Causes and Consequences of Rising Cesarean Birth Rates," at the 2018 American Association of Physical Anthropologists Meeting (April 14 in Austin). The symposium drew together anthropologists, biologists, and practitioners who study cesarean birth using evolutionary and biocultural theoretical approaches. The symposium will now be converted to a special issue of the American Journal of Human Biology, with Drs Veile and Rosenberg as guest editors.

3/21/2018 - Melissa Remis and Amanda Veile received grants totaling $17,000 from the Purdue University Laboratory and University Core Facility Research Equipment Program! The funds will be used to purchase equipment that will expand the research and training capacities of our Bioanthropology laboratories.

3/19/2018 - Dr. Ian Lindsay has been awarded two internal equipment grants from Purdue’s Office of the Executive Vice-President for Research and Partnerships to update and expand his use of magnetometry and drone-based aerial thermal imaging of Bronze Age sites as part of his archaeological research in Armenia.

3/19/2018 - Research led by Dr. Erik Otárola-Castillo hopes to further understand early hominids' life with the use of statistics. 

3/7/2018 - Dr. Ian Lindsay is featured in the annual report publication from the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships. The article discusses his research using drone technology in order to capture data from Bronze Age sites in Armenia, archaeological evidence that Nubians and Egyptians integrated into a community, and even married, in ancient Sudan. 

1/16/2018 - Dr. Erik Otárola-Castillo was invited to the Department of Anthropology at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to present his work on “The Effects of Climate Change on the Diet of Great Plains Paleoindians” in their lecture series on Environmental Archaeology on January 18th at 12:30 PM.

2017

12/4/2017 - Congratulations to Jennifer L. Johnson.  Jennifer received the 2017 Junior Scholar Award at the recently completed American Anthropological Association meetings. The Anthropology and Environment Society recognized the following article:

Johnson, Jennifer Lee. 2017. Eating and Existence on an Island in Southern Uganda. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 37(1): 2–23. 

This article examines contemporary ontological conflicts between people who make their living on an island with fish that are considered by fisheries managers to be “commercially extinct” and people who make their living managing “commercially important” fisheries for this region as a whole. It is an experiment in worlding, the work of wading between content and contexts to configure webs of relevant relations through which the politics of eating and existence play out along Uganda's southern littoral. By attending ethnographically to observable actions and concrete practices, I suggest that fish workers and fisheries managers enact multiple, relatively distinct versions of food, fish, bodies of water, and fisheries. Attending to this multiplicity is crucial for rendering plausible already existing alternatives to an overdetermined future of death, depravity, and collapse that features within scholarly, popular, and policy-oriented accounts of Lake Victoria's fisheries.

11/2/2017 - Amanda Veile and collaborator Karen Rosenberg organized a symposium "The Evolutionary Causes and Consequences of Rising Cesarean Birth Rates," which was accepted for a special session at the 2018 American Association of Physical Anthropologists Meeting (April 11-14 in August). The symposium draws together anthropologists, biologists, and practitioners who study cesarean birth using evolutionary and bio cultural theoretical approaches.

11/1/2017 – Congratulations to Michele Buzon on presenting the Research and Scholarship Distinction Distinguished Lecture on Oct. 30th. Pictured below is (left to right) Suresh Garimella, Michele Buzon, and Lu Ann Aday who has endowed Purdue’s most prestigious research award in the humanities and social sciences. Dr. Buzon received this award for her groundbreaking work on bioarchaeology. Buzon is viewed as a leader in bioarchaeology and strontium isotope analysis. She has earned an international reputation for her expertise and innovation for her research in the Nile Valley. 

9/1/17: Dr. Amanda Veile’s recent research on the growth consequences of Cesarean births was featured on President Daniels’ annual address to Purdue University.

8/31/17: Dr. Amanda Veile gave an invited lecture, "Biological Causes and Consequences of Cesarean Birth" at Wabash College as part of their Biology Department Seminar Series.

8/14/2017- New Faces and Transitions in the Anthropology Department! We are very pleased to welcome our two new assistant professors, who have joined us in August 2017.  We look forward to having them on the team!

ANDREW FLACHS   
Andrew Flachs' research spans sustainable agriculture, food studies, the anthropology of knowledge, and political ecology. He earned his PhD in cultural anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and worked with the Karl Jaspers Centre for Advanced Transcultural Studies at Heidelberg University before joining Purdue as part of the Advanced Methods Cluster.  His research in South India, Eastern Europe, and North America has been supported by agencies including the US Department of Education, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the National Geographic Society.  In addition to peer-reviewed scientific articles, Andrew's writing and photography has appeared in public venues including the National Geographic Magazine, Nature: Plants, and Voices for Biodiversity.  This fall, Dr. Flachs will be teaching Anthropology 10000, Introduction to Anthropology.

STACY LINDSHIELD    
Stacy Lindshield is a biological anthropologist whose research intersects primate behavior, ecology, nutrition, and conservation. She studies savanna chimpanzees in Senegal at Mount Assirik in Niokolo-Koba National Park and at the Fongoli Savanna Chimpanzee Project. Her current projects include a habituation feasibility assessment of chimpanzees at Mount Assirik and nutritional facets of hunting, meat eating, and meat sharing behaviors. She also serves as director of research at the Monkey Bridge Project, a non-profit organization that aims to preserve and manage Costa Rican primate populations through biological corridor networks and community engagement at the Gandoca-Manzanillo National Wildlife Refuge. Support for this work has been provided by the National Science Foundation, Leakey Foundation, Rufford Small Grant Foundation, and Margot Marsh Biodiversity Foundation.  In fall semester, Dr. Lindshield is teaching Anthropology 20400, Introduction to Biological Anthropology and Human Evolution, and ANTH 23500, The Great Apes.

At the same time, we are saying farewell to three tenured faculty members and one Visiting Assistant Professor.  Associate Professor Su’ad Abdul Khabeer—who received a fellowship for Yale’s Institute of Sacred Music this year—has accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan in their American Cultures department.  We wish her well in her new role.  Professor Evelyn Blackwood has retired and been named Professor Emerita.  She plans to spend the first part of her retirement finishing her book on the research she has been conducting in San Francisco, California.  Professor Richard Blanton has retired and moved out west, to be nearer to his family. And finally, Dr. Shimelis Beyene Gebru has finished his term here and we wish him well in his future plans.  We will miss all of you

8/7-11/17: Dr. Amanda Veile was invited to give several lectures at three Peruvian Universities, titled Investigaciones de Salúd Indígena en México y Sudamérica: Contribuciones de la Antropología Biológica (Investigations of Indigenous Health in Mexico and South America: Contributions of Biological Anthropology). At Universidad Ricardo Palma, Lima, Perú (August 11),  Universidad Nacional Hermilio Valdizan, Huánuco, Perú (August 10), and Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga, Ayachuco, Perú (August 7).

5/11/2017 - Congratulations to Michele Buzon! Dr. Buzon is the recipient of the 2017 Research and Scholarship Distinction Award for her work in bioarchaeology. This is one of the University's top three research honors. You can read more about Dr. Buzon’s groundbreaking research here.  

4/11/2017- There are many ways that faculty engage with their research—teaching about it, writing articles, giving presentations at conferences.  But there is something very special about those rare occasions when faculty publish a book.

“’The gestation period was much longer than 9 months!’ one of my friends once told me.  Ever since, I have wanted to celebrate book completions,” noted Department Head Ellen Gruenbaum.  “A book is a rare and special accomplishment in the life of a professor!”  

So the Department of Anthropology held a special reception on Monday.  Students, faculty, and guests gathered to honor seven faculty who have published books this year.  Each spoke briefly about their work.

Two of the books are monographs based on intensive ethnographic research.  Laura Zanotti’s Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon:  The Kayapo’s Fight for Just Livelihoods (University of Arizona Press) recounts the struggles she has observed in her many years of research with the native peoples there.  Several groups of undergraduate and graduate students at Purdue have accompanied her to the community of Aukre. There they learned from their Kayapo teachers about the forest environment and cultural heritage while also collaborating on developing a media center and movie-making.  Su’ad Abdul Khabeer’s book, Muslim Cool:  Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (New York University Press) is a fresh and innovative look at the ways multiethnic American Muslims express themselves and challenge racist norms—through ideas, dress, and social activism.

Professor Rich Blanton completed his opus magnum this year.  It’s been called “big anthropology, the likes of which we do not see every day.” How Humans Cooperate:  Confronting the Challenges of Collective Action (U Press of Colorado) moves across time and place to investigate human cooperation using anthropology’s broad understanding of biological, adaptive, and cultural dimensions of human society’s efforts to work together effectively.  His book is co-authored with Purdue alumnus Lane Fargher.  Myrdene Anderson co-edited a collection called Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit (Purdue U. Press.).

Evie Blackwood worked for long years to prepare her new textbook, Cultural Anthropology: Mapping Cultures Across Space and Time (Cengage), coauthored with Janice Stockard.  Two other texts round out this year’s crop of books:  Using Anthropology in the World:  A Guide to Becoming a Professional Anthropologist is Riall Nolan’s new text for courses like the one he pioneered at Purdue.  Popular with undergrads, the course “Using Anthropology in the World” has launched many of them along the path toward applying anthropology to solving human problems and to their careers in the “real world.”  Also a part of the department’s Applied and Practicing Anthropology focus is the eighth edition of Adjunct Professor Elizabeth Briody’s book, The Cultural Dimension of Global Business (coauthored with Gary Ferraro, Routledge).

College of Liberal Arts Dean David Reingold commented that this degree of productivity for a small department is a remarkable achievement.

The students in the audience were clearly proud of their professors’ achievements.  “I really liked hearing about these important ideas!” commented graduate student Allison Kirkham.  “We should do this more often.”  Maybe.  But probably less often than every nine months!

3/28/17 -  A record number of faculty and students are participating in the Society for Applied Anthropology conference in Santa Fe, NM, 

3/28/17 - Richard Blanton’s Work on Premodern Democracies Featured in Science. It wasn't just Greece: Archaeologists find early democratic societies in the Americas. “‘Blanton and his colleagues opened up a new way of examining our data,’ says Rita Wright, an archaeologist at New York University in New York City who studies the 5000-year-old Indus civilization in today's India and Pakistan, which also shows signs of collective rule. ‘A whole new set of scholarship has emerged about complex societies.’”

3/10/17 - Dr. Su’ad Abdal Khabeer has been awarded a year-long fellowship in residence at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music.  Her proposed project, Allah and Justice: A Cultural History of Islam and Hip Hop, is a global exploration of Muslims, hip hop and social justice framed by a series of questions: What is the historical relationship between Islam and hip hop? What contributions have Muslims made to hip hop music and culture? How has hip hop become a means for Muslims to answer the Qur’an’s call “to enjoin the good and the forbid the wrong?” There are three thematic foci of the project. The first, “Genealogies of Liberation” focuses on the history of Islam in hip hop’s development and the second theme, “Hip Hop as Sacred Music,” will examine hip hop as a form of sonic religion for Muslims. The third theme, “Hip Hop, Islam and Revolution,” looks the “transglobal hiphop ummah” to explore the ways in which hip hop is being deployed in Muslim revolutionary praxis globally. In line with my commitment to public scholarship and the Institute of Sacred Music’s complementary engagement with sacred arts and public life, this project will culminate in a book-length manuscript--collection of six essays that reflect upon the thematic foci of the project and a performance ethnography. She will spend the fellowship doing research and writing to complete the project.   

3/7/2017 - Dr. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer participated in an online forum called "Islam on Trial" that was published in the Boston Review. Dr. Khabeers response focuses on the double burden of being Black and Muslim vis-a-vis the national security state.

1/31/2017 - The work of Dr. Stacy M. Lindshield new Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology (fall 2017) on chimpanzee politics, titled “In Rare Killing, Chimpanzees Cannibalize Former Leader” is highlighted by National Geographic News.

1/29/2017 – Dr. Suad Abdul Khabeer publishes article “Trumps Muslim ban is a dangerous distraction” in Aljazeera News.

1/9/2017 - Dr. Amanda Veile and Dr. Jennifer Johnson were featured in the Fall 2016 issue of Purdue University's Think Magazine. Their research was showcased as part of an article on "Feminism's Future."

1/9/2017 - Dr. Amanda Veile received a $35,000 grant from the College of Liberal Arts (Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences) for her project "Biology and Socioecology of Birth and Early Childhood Maturational Processes: A Semi-Longitudinal Study of Yucatec Maya Subsistence Farmers." 

11/28/2016 - The Tippecanoe County Historical Association (TCHA) and Purdue’s Department of Anthropology and Department of History will host MHAC 13 October 13-15, 2017. The theme is Reconstructing, Representing, and Reenacting: Historical Archaeology and Public Education. 2017 marks both the 300th anniversary of the founding of Fort Ouiatenon, a French fur trade post in Tippecanoe County, and the 50th anniversary of the Feast of the Hunter’s Moon, one of the largest annual re-enactments of the 18th century fur trade in the United States. To commemorate these anniversary milestones part of the conference will be dedicated to Fort Ouiatenon past and present, and the fur trade and historical reenactments more generally. Papers, posters, and lightning round talks on any topic related to historical archaeology in the Midwest are also welcome, but we especially encourage potential presenters to focus on the use of historical archaeology data (artifacts, museum objects, buildings, landscapes) to reconstruct, represent, or reenact history for a variety of audiences. Registration and logistical information and links will soon be available online. 

12/19/2017 - Congratulations to Hannah Hawkins on receiving an Undergrad Research Scholarship.

12/6/17 - Congratulations to Matt Pike for being awarded the Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award from the National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Science Program. Matt’s faculty adviser throughout this graduate program is H. Kory Cooper, professor of anthropology and materials engineering. 

12/6/2017 – Congratulations to Erik Otárola-Castillo who recently received the Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences grants from EVPRP. Erik received a grant for $47,000 for “Estimating Food Security Risk Management Behavior of early North American Foragers and Farmers.” also co-authored by Purdue Anthropology graduate student, Melissa Torquato and Purdue Anthropology undergraduate student, Hannah C. Hawkins.

12/6/17 - Congratulations to Stacy Lindshield who recently received the Exploratory Research in the Social Sciences grants from EVPRP. Stacy received a $38,000 grant for “Reconsidering Female Chimpanzees:  Nutritional and Political Motives to Hunt and Share Food.”

12/6/2017 – Congratulations Laura Zanotti for receiving a Global Synergy Research Grant.  Laura will receive $16,000 for “Biocultural Landscapes:  Indigenous Rights and Conservation at Belém +30.”

12/6/2017 – Congratulations to Andrew Flachs for receiving a Global Synergy Research Grant. Andrew will receive $20,500 for “Preserving Probiotics:  Biocultural Links Between the Human Gut Microbiome and Fermented Foods.” 

12/6/2017 – Anthropology has two graduate students who are recipients of the College of Liberal Arts Global Synergy Research Grant for students. They are:

• Humera Dinar, for “Development and Marginalization in Northern Pakistan,” in the amount of $5,000, and

• Sarah Huang, for “If we can’t grow rice, then what?  Remaking Agroecological Livelihoods in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta” for $9,200.

10/12/2017 - Congratulations to Michele Buzon for receiving Purdue’s 2017 Research and Scholarship Distinction Award. Buzon will deliver the Research and Scholarship Distinction Distinguished Lecture on Oct. 30 in Stewart Center's Fowler Hall. The 10:30 a.m. lecture is free and open to the public. 

9/6/2017 - Congratulations to Purdue University Anthropology doctoral candidate, Liz Hall, who received a grant from the National Science Foundation for support of the project entitled "Doctoral Dissertation Research: Zoonotic Risks at the Human-Primate Interface: Behavior, Nutritional Status, and Immune Function.” Her project is under the direction of Professor Melissa J. Remis.

Liz is conducting fieldwork with local communities in the Dzanga-Sangha Reserve in the Central African Republic and collecting data on diet, nutritional status, and behavior of indigenous and migrant men and women with different subsistence patterns and practices that may put them at varying risk for zoonotic diseases. She is collecting a variety of anthropometric and ethnographic data, and her research will include laboratory analyses of biomarkers of health and inflammation.

8/28/2017 - Congratulations to anthropology doctoral candidate Matthew Pike (mentor: Kory Cooper) on being awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award for $18,893 from the National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Science Program. His project is on “Northern Innovation:  Modeling Copper Technologies.”  Matt will be using this funding to travel to several northern Indigenous communities in early November 2017, specifically Cambridge Bay and Kugluktuk in Nunavut, Canada.  There he will be presenting his dissertation research on Innovation in Prehistoric Indigenous Copper Technologies to local descendant Inuit communities.  He will also conduct copper-working workshops where participants can experience the process of replicating copper tools from the archaeological record, seek feedback from the community on ways to provide digital access to the database of copper archaeological artifacts that forms the core of my dissertation research, and document any personal collections of copper artifacts that have been collected in the community.

3/21/2017 - Congratulations to Lily Anderson (ANTH Senior)! She was offered a “full ride” to pursue her MD/PhD in Anthropology at Michigan State University: a Distinguished (5-year) Graduate School Fellowship AND a Spectrum (5-year) Fellowship from MSU’s College of Human Medicine to investigate Amish women’s reproductive health issues.

3/20/2017 - Purdue Anthropology Graduate student Melissa G. Torquato receives National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program Award. Melissa is 1 of 11 Purdue students, and 1 of 16 in Biological Anthropology to receive this year's award.

3/10/2017 - Dr. Su’ad Abdal Khabeer has been awarded a year-long fellowship in residence at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. Read here for more information about her project, Allah and Justice: A Cultural History of Islam and Hip Hop

3/9/2017 - Congratulations to Assistant Professor Zoe Nyssa on her Library Scholars grant.

2016

• 10/21/2016 - Ph.D. candidate Savannah Schulze (Remis) is currently conducting fieldwork in Uganda thanks to a Wenner-Gren Foundation Grant for her dissertation project. 
• 10/13/2016 - Prof. Amanda Veile's published research on the epidemiologic link between cesarean birth and childhood obesity is highlighted by Purdue News.
• 10/06/2016 - Purdue features Big Ideas around campus, including Prof. Sherylyn Briller's on how to educate people to more rapidly gain the wisdom typically accumulated over the course of a lifetime.
• 9/27/2016 - Prof. Sherylyn Briller and Ph.D. candidate Elizabeth Wirtz are featured in Anthropology News for developing a course where technology students learn to apply anthropological principles to develop design solutions.   
• 9/21/2016 - Prof. Ian Lindsay receives $221,173 from the National Science Foundation for two years of fieldwork research, and is featured by CLA news.
• 9/22/2016 - Prof. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer participated in an invited online forum entitled Religion, secularism, and Black Lives Matter.  
• 9/22/2016 - “Walking the Ballroom” (with a nod to Marlon Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit). Photo taken in class on September 22 as Dr. Blackwoods ANTH/WGSS 482, Sexual Diversity in Global Perspectives class experienced first hand walking the runway. Students showed up dressed for the experience!    
• 9/19/2016 - Prof. Amanda Veile gave a public lecture at the University of Notre Dame about her research entitled "Birth in Transition: Implications for Indigenous Health and Demography".
• Associate Professor, Su’ad Abdul Khabeer was among a small group of scholars who study Islam and Muslims, they were asked to write a short response to Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban”. Dr. Khabeer is the second response after the journalist introduction.
• On April 28 the Anthropology Department celebrated the end of the 2015-2016 academic school year with our annual Awards Banquet.  The department is proud of the many accomplishments from our Faculty, Grad Students, and Undergraduates. 
• Congratulations to Jonathan Micon. Jonathan received the Outstanding Graduating Senior award in Anthropology and CLA Honors Graduate.   

HONORS AND AWARDS

• Congratulations to Katie Whitmore for winning the opportunity to participate in the Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Summer Workshop.
• In spring 2016, Dr. Laura Zanotti (Anthropology) and Dr. Kimberly Marion Suiseeya (Political Science) received a Center for the Environment sustainable communities seed grant for the project entitled, “From presence to influence: examining the politics of indigenous representation in global environmental governance.”
• Dr. Laura Zanotti recently was awarded a Service-Learning Faculty Grant from the Center of Instructional Excellence at Purdue. She will be a Junior Fellow from April 2016 – April 2017.
• Congratulations to Sarah Huang, who received a Graduate Student Incentive Award from the Purdue Climate Change Research Center.  Sarah was also accepted into the US Borlaug Summer Institute on Global Foood Security that will take place at Purdue in June.
• Congratulations to Dr. Amanda Veile, who has received the Purdue Anthropology Department's Excellence in Teaching Award!
• Dr. Amanda Veile and co-investigator Karen Kramer recently received a $25,000 grant from the Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The grant will fund the purchase of laboratory and field equipment for their ongoing study of maternal-child health and immuno-nutrition in Yucatec Maya subsistence farmers.
• Congratulations to Ph.D. student Katie Whitmore who has been selected as a 2016 Humanities Without Walls Pre-Doctoral Fellow!
• Congratulations to our graduate student Savannah Schulze. She has been awarded a Global Synergy Research Grant for Students by the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts for her dissertation research project entitled, Mountain Gorillas (Gorilla beringi beringi) in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda: interrelationships with Batwa and other local communities.
• Congratulations to our recent Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Ryan Plis, for receiving the College of Liberal Arts' Distinguished Dissertation Award for his dissertation, "Families in Transition: Gender Non-Conformists and their Kin Networks in the Mid-Southern U.S.” This is the highest award given to dissertations in the College!

RESEARCH, PUBLICATIONS, AND PRESENTATIONS

• Dr. Melissa Remis was featured in Purdue News discussing a recent feature article and cover in American Journal of Human Biology. 
• Dr. Kory Cooper is featured in this Purdue News article discussing his artifacts’ metallurgical analysis showing Old World metals were traded on the Alaska coast several hundred years before contact with Europeans.
• Dr. Michele Buzon shows new bioarchaeological evidence that Nubians and Egyptians integrated into a community, and even married, in ancient Sudan. 
• Amanda Veile, Erik Otárola-Castillo recently published their research titled Sibling Competition & Growth Tradeoffs. Biological vs. Statistical Significance, Kramer KL, Veile A, Otárola-Castillo E (2016) Sibling Competition & Growth Tradeoffs. Biological vs. Statistical Significance. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0150126. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150126
• Professor Abdul Khabeer spoke in a discussion on American Muslims recently on Aljazeera English.  2015

• Dr. Abdul Khabeer was recently awarded CLA’s Enhancing Research in the Humanities and Arts (ERHA) grant for her digital humanities project, Sapelo Square: An Online Resources on African American Islam. Sapelo Square is the first online platform dedicated to the comprehensive documentation and analysis of the African American Muslim experience. Sapelo Square, which is managed by Dr. Abdul Khabeer and her academic and non-academic collaborators, features original research and perspectives and also curates content from online and offline texts and audiovisual materials. The EHRA grant will be used to help Sapelo Square better incorporate the best digital humanities practices and innovative technologies into its work. Dr. Abdul Khabeer's long-term objective is for Sapelo Square to be a multifaceted interactive platform that creates new knowledge on a critical yet understudied segment of American society as well as new directions for humanities scholarship on critical issues of race, religion and national belonging.
• Ellen Gruenbaum chaired a session at the International Breast Cancer and Nutrition Symposium in Guadeloupe, French West Indies, in October.
• The Exponent, Purdue University's student-run newspaper conducted an interview with Anthropology faculty Amanda Veile and Erik Otárola-Castillo. The Exponent was interested in our faculty's opinion on the trendy "Paleo" diet. Click on the following link to read the article "Paleo or tasty treat: Does it matter'
• Anthropology graduate student, Matthew Pike recently traveled to Michigan State to take part in a National Endowment for the Humanities, Office of Digital Humanities funded Institute on Digital Archaeology Method and Practice. Matthew was fortunate to be one of 20 selected out of almost 200 applicants from across the archeological spectrum (academic, CRM, graduate students, tenured faculty, museum professionals, etc.)
• We are pleased to welcome Erik Otárola-Castillo to our department. Erik has recently co-authored and published an article "When mothers need others: Why does it take a village to raise a child." It has almost become cliché to say ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ Why do human mothers, unlike most among mammals, rely on help to raise children? To answer this question, a new study co-authored by Karen Kramer and Erik Otárola-Castillo published in the Journal of Human Evolution, and highlighted by the Harvard Gazette and other popular media news sources, uses mathematical and numerical modeling to explore mother-offspring characteristics throughout the human evolutionary trajectory. The work shows that during many of the early changes in our evolutionary past, a mother and her children can cooperate as a group to provide sufficient support each other—later in time, however, as more modern human characteristics developed (e.g., earlier weaning, shorter birth intervals, longer juvenile dependence) mothers began to need cooperation from other adults and the community at large."
• The Anthropology Department is hosting a visiting undergraduate research student this summer and in the fall term. Karen Lorena Romero Leal, who is joining us as part of Purdue’s UREP-C program, comes to us from Columbia with an interest in Amazonian indigenous peoples, testimonial literature, and oral histories. Karen will be working with Dr. Laura Zanotti and Dr. Sherri Briller.
• An illustrated profile of Prof. Laura Zanotti’s environmental anthropology research and field school in the Amazon rainforest is featured in the latest issue of CLA's THiNK Magazine.
• Congratulations to Professors Laura Zanotti and Kory Cooper who have been promoted to Associate Professor!
• Ellen Gruenbaum presented a lecture on her research to about 40 UN staff at the United Nations Development Program in Khartoum, Sudan, on Feb. 25th. Her topic was "Generation of Change: FGM/C and Abandonment Efforts in Sudan.”
• Ellen Gruenbaum gave a series of lectures to Public Health Master’s students at the Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan.

AWARDS AND HONORS

• Ingrid Ramon Parra and Laura Zanotti have received a 2015-16 Purdue Research Foundation Research Grant for "Menire making Movies: A Participatory Video Project with Kayapo Women in the Brazilian Amazon".
• Matthew Pike and Kory Cooper have received a 2015-16 Purdue Research Foundation Grant for "Prehistoric Copper Technology in the Arctic and Subarctic: A Geospatial Analysis of Hunter-Gatherer Innovation".
• Congratulations to Elizabeth Hall who has just been notified that she has received a 2015 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Fellowship to support her doctoral studies. Liz is currently completing her MS in our program which is serving as a pilot for her developing Ph.D. research on Zoonotic Pathogens: Disease Transmission among Apes and Humans in Mosaic Habitats in West and Central Africa.
• Prof. Richard Blanton, Lane Farger (Purdue Research Affiliate), and Verenice Heredia Espinoza have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to support their project "The Relationship Between Household Organization And Governance.” The aim of their research is to uncover changes in household formation and economies in a newly-forming republican system of governance in the Postclassic Period of Tlaxcala, a site in the Central Highlands of Mexico.
• Dr. Abdul Khabeer is co-PI on the “Muslims in the Midwest: An Oral History Project” that was recently awarded a grant as part of the Global Midwest Initiative by the Humanities Without Walls consortium. The project will establish and build a digital archive that documents the varied experiences of American Muslims in the Midwest through testimonies across generational, gender, geographical, socio-economic, and ethnic differences. Dr. Abdul Khabeer’s contribution will focus on African American Muslims in the Midwest. The Senior Project Advisor is Mohammed Khalil (Michigan State and other co-PI’s are Junaid Rana (Illinois), Nadine Naber (Illinois-Chicago)and Asma Afsaruddin (Indiana).

RESEARCH, PUBLICATIONS, AND PRESENTATIONS

• You can read about the research of several of our Anthropologists who were featured in the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships Annual Report. Dr. Briller (p. 9), Dr. Buzon (p. 12), Beth Gravalos (p. 30), Dr. Remis (p.33).
• Read a recent publication by one of our graduate students, Jonas Ecke Continuity and Discontinuity: Cultural Change in a Refugee Camp in Ghana. PentecoStudies: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Research on the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, 14(1)
• Congratulations to Dr. Riall Nolan for his recent book publication: Internationalizing the Academy: Lessons of Leadership in Higher Education, Edited by Gilbert W. Merkx and Riall W. Nolan
• Graduate students Betsy Wirtz and Jonas Ecke were invited to speak at the Purdue UNICEF (United Nations Children's Fund) Charity Banquet on Friday night. They discussed issues relating to refugee children.
• Read one of Dr. Richard Blanton's recent articles, “Theories of Ethnicity and the Dynamics of Ethnic Change in Multiethnic Societies” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112: no. 30: 9175-9181.
• Erik Otárola-Castillo and Ian Lindsay participated in Cumberland Elementary School’s annual Math Night, where they created a geocaching game to get kids excited about developing map reading skills.

2014

• Dr. Ian Lindsay won the Departmental Excellence in Teaching Award for 2014.  He was honored for his work in utilizing student-centered hands-on teaching and technology.  He teaches archaeology, technology and culture, and the large lecture Intro to General Anthropology course.
• Katelyn Reavis presented her research with Dr. Michele Buzon at the American Association of Physical Anthropology in Calgary, Alberta Canada, April 2014.
• Melissa Remis and Carolyn Jost Robinson published an article in 2014 on ethnoprimatology and multispecies approaches, with coauthors Nick Malone, Alison Wade, Agustin Fuentes, and Erin Riley.  The article is titled, “Ethnoprimatology: Critical interdisciplinary and multispecies approaches in anthropology.”  Critique of Anthropology 341(1):8-29.
• Professor Melissa Remis’s research was featured in Purdue News on May 20, 2014.  The research studied the effects of integrated conservation and development in the Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve, including the first look at the impact on people's health. 
• Dr. Evelyn Blackwood was interviewed by The Daily Beast about her research among the Minangkabau in West Sumatra, Indonesia.  
•  On July 31, 2014, Dr. Elizabeth Rowe presents her talk on “The Evolution of Menstruation” to the “Science on Tap” series at the Lafayette Brewing Company, on 
• Congratulations to Ian Lindsay for receiving an Enhancing Research in the Humanities and the Arts Grant from the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research and Partnerships for his research project entitled, "Investigating Territorial Commitments and Long-Term Political Process within Bronze and Iron Age Fortified Landscapes in Armenia."
• Congratulations to Sarah Caldwell for receiving a Global Synergy Grant for Students from the office of the President for her research project entitled, "In the Wake of War: Population Health in Ottoman-Occupied Croatia,14th-17th Centuries." Congratulations to Ingrid Ramon Parra who also received this award for her research project entitled "Menire Making Movies: A Participatory Video Project with Kayapo Women in the Brazilian Amazon."
• Dr. Audrey Ricke was the invited speaker for the Lafayette's Daybreak Rotary Club on thursday, September 11th.  Her presentation was entitled "Supporting the Community: German Identity and Traditions in Brazil."
• The research of professors Kory Cooper and Michele Buzon are featured in the Sept/Oct issue of Purdue Alumnus Magazine. 
• Dr. Ellen Gruenbaum is spending part of her sabbatical on a fellowship for a 4-week Writing Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center at the Villa Serbelloni, located in Bellagio on Lake Como. She’ll be working on a project entitled, “Generation of Change: New leaders and initiatives on female genital modifications in Africa and beyond.”
• Assistant Professors Kory Cooper and Laura Zanotti are part of an 8 member team of interdisciplinary scholars recently awarded a $57,000 Mellon Grand Challenge Exploratory Award to investigate e-waste. One result of rapid innovation in the electronics industry is that electronic devices now often have very short use-lives. Electronic devices are consumed and discarded in increasing numbers and most of these devices contain metals or plastics that are harmful to human health. This project will investigate public understanding of this phenomenon and engage the local community in finding solutions.
• We are pleased to announce that we have 2 new Faculty joining the Department of Anthropology and 3 Visiting Assistant Professors this year!
• Dr. Sherylyn Briller, has been appointed Associate Professor of sociocultural anthropology/applied and practicing. She holds degrees from Carleton College (BA), and Case Western Reserve University (MA and PhD). She most recently has been teaching Anthropology at Wayne State University (Detroit) where she also served in the Institute of Gerontology and the Interdisciplinary Center to Advance Palliative Care Excellence. This fall she will be teaching our course Global Health: Anthropological Perspectives (Anth 340). She will be taking a lead role in the development of our Master’s degree track in Applied and Practicing Anthropology.
• Dr. LaShandra Sullivan will be joining us as assistant professor of sociocultural anthropology a year from now, in fall 2015. She studied Philosophy at Howard (BA), International Relations at Yale (MA), and Anthropology at the University of Chicago (MA, PhD). Her doctoral research was on labor, agribusiness, and land protest camps in Brazil, and she previously did research and also worked as an economic attaché for the State Department in West Africa. She will expand our department’s curriculum on Latin America, rural-urban anthropology, development, diversity and globalization.
• Audrey Ricke-Visiting Assistant Professor, Fall 2014-Spring 2015
• Dr. Ricke is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on transnational German identity in Brazil and the United States. She has done research on German folk dances, festivals, and gardens in southern Brazil and the role that the aesthetics at these tourism activities play in navigating race, class, and transnational identity.
• Elizabeth Rowe—Visiting Assistant Professor, Fall 2014-Spring 2015
• Dr. Rowe is a biological anthropologist whose research focuses on gene-environment interactions in the menstrual cycle and other aspects of women’s reproductive physiology. She is also interested in the consequences of persistent social inequalities on women’s reproductive biology.
• Dr. Ama Boakyewa-Visiting Assistant Professor, Fall 2014
• Dr. Boakyewa is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on alternative religious/cultural practice and identity formations. She also has a background in African studies. She has done research in Ghana on ethnic and religious pluralism and identity at the Akonnedi Shrine.
• Congratulations to Dr. Michele Buzon who was recently appointed to a five-year term as a University Faculty Scholar.
• Melissa Remis has studied the effects of integrated conservation and development in the Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Reserve, this includes the first look at the impact on people's health. You will find continued reading on her research at this link to the article featured in Purdue News.
• Congratulations to Associate Professor Michele Buzon on her award from the National Science Foundation for her project entitled, “Collaborative Research: Impact and Accommodation Through Cultural Contact” She will use the funds ($135,272) to support her bioarchaeological research investigating the impact of Egypt’s New Kingdom Empire (c. 1500-1050 BC) on the Kerma culture in Nubia through an examination of identity and health before and after the conquest and colonization of the area (with UCSB collaborator Stuart Tyson Smith). This research is also being supported by Purdue Office of the Vice President for Research Bridge Funding Program ($48,045).
• Assistant Professor Kory Cooper’s collaborative archaeological research and teaching with the School of Materials Engineering was highlighted in the April 8th, 2014 installment of “Purdue Profiles.” In this piece Cooper talks about the course “Archaeology and Materials Science”, which he co-teaches with MSE faculty. Click here for a link to this article.
• Katelyn Reavis presented her research with Dr. Michele Buzon at the American Association of Physical Anthropology in Calgary, Alberta Canada.
• Congratulations to our grad student Aiden Powell on winning the Berenice Carroll Social Justice Award this year! As second-year graduate student in Anthropology, he was recognized for his work in "Advocating for Transgender-Inclusive Health Insurance at Purdue University." Aiden is currently working on his master's thesis on the provision of health services to transgender students and plans to work in applied anthropology in the coming years.
• Melissa Remis and Carolyn Jost Robinson just published an article on Ethnoprimatology and Multispecies approaches with coauthors Nick Malone, Alison Wade, Agustin Fuentes, Erin Riley, Melissa Remis and Carolyn Jost Robinson. 2014. “Ethnoprimatology: Critical interdisciplinary and multi species approaches in anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 341(1):8-29.
• Kevin Vaughn was in Japan during February to participate in two international symposia in Osaka and Yamagata.
• Dr. Ian Lindsay recently won the Departmental Excellence in Teaching Award 2014.
• In November, Dr. Ian Lindsay was awarded two grants from Purdue's Office of the Vice President for Research in support of his archaeological work in Armenia:
• • Transdisciplinary and Interdisciplinary Research Grant ($8778): "Using Purdue’s MSE Electron Microscopy Facility to Study Pottery Technology and Social Organization among Bronze Age Fortress Settlements in Armenia."
• • Non-laboratory Research Infrastructure and Equipment Program Grant, Tier 2 ($17,861): "Funding Request for Archaeological Survey and Remote Sensing Equipment."
• On November 23, 2014, our department participated at the Grad Fair at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois. Over 50 people
• stopped by our table to ask about our program, and had a chance to chat about the many different aspects of graduate school. Many thanks to everyone who helped, Anjali Bhardwaj, Ryan Plis, Ellen Gruenbaum, and Talin Lindsay!
• Purdue anthropologist selected for 2015 Race Across USA to combine 3,000-mile run with research. 

• 2013

• Congratulations to Diana Steele who received a Global Synergy Research Grant for Students from the Office of the Vice President for Research.  The grant will fund dissertation work entitled, “Geographies of Difference: Examining Race and Place through Amazonian Migrants Livelihoods in Peru.”
•  Dr. Evelyn Blackwood was interviewed on the topic of “Global Genders” on Public Radio International’s weekly program “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” which aired on Aug. 30, 2013.  
•  Dr. Michele Buzon spoke with the National Geographic Radio Weekend Show (June 23) about the Nubian Pharaohs and her research.  
•  Dr. Michele Buzon’s collaborative bioarchaeological research in Tombos, Sudan has been highlighted by the National Science Foundation.
•  Evelyn Blackwood was recently interviewed on BBC Radio's Today Programme concerning her research on the matrilineal Minangkabau in Indonesia.  The interview focused on the lives of men in a matrilineal society, and was part of a BBC mini series examining changing Western conceptions of masculinity.
•  One of our PhD graduates, Katie Smith has accepted a new position aspostdoctoral fellow in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Houston.  Katie is working in the lab of Dr. Ezemenari Obasi.  Katie will be examining stress and addiction in African American populations.  The study will be examining the role of addiction as a coping mechanism for stress in a population that deals with multiple daily chronic stressors, including health disparities and discrimination.
•  Evelyn Latour (MS 2012) has been hired as a Market Research Strategist for an international firm, CarbonSix, doing client interfacing, field research study management, qualitative data analysis and report writeup. Her coworkers include a nice mixture of academic and business backgrounds--MAs, a couple of PhDs, and some MBAs--which is just the sort of interdisciplinary work environment she hoped for.  Good luck, Evelyn!
•  Dr. Bryce Carlson has authored a paper on diurnal variation in nutrient consumption appearing in this month's issue of the American Journal of Primatology.  With co-authors Dr. Jessica Rothman and Dr. John Mitani, Dr. Carlson showed that wild chimpanzees at Kibale National Park, Uganda preferentially consumed 2 common dietary resources late in the day when their nutritional quality was highest.  This study suggests chimpanzees may be capable of tracking changes in nutritional composition on the order of hours, not just weeks or months. 

2012 

• The Anthropology Department is pleased to invite students to submit papers for the 2013 Brazil Abroad scholarship competition.   Check out the flyer and find out more information about the program here.
• Franco Lai has won the 2013 Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion Graduate Student Award for Research Excellence! Her award-winning paper is titled "Sexualities in Transnational Migrant Circuits: Female same-sex relations among female domestic migrant workers in Hong Kong."  For further information about the award click here.
• Professor Evelyn Blackwood was awarded a Title IX service award as a pioneer, advocate, and mentor in the area of gender equity. Congratulations Dr. Blackwood!  Click here for Purdue Today's feature of Dr. Blackwood's accomplishments.
• Are you planning on applying to the Anthropology Graduate Program for Fall 2013?  Please join us for a visitation day on Monday, October 22 to learn about graduate study at Purdue!  For more information and to RSVP, please contact Talin Lindsay at anthgrad@purdue.edu.”
• Jennifer Studebaker (M.S. May 2012) has started a new position as Office Coordinator at the Society for Ethnomusicology at Indiana University.  She reports that she really likes the position and will be learning a lot about non-profit organization management.  Congratulations, Jennifer!
• A publication based on MS research by PhD student, Sarah Schrader, is now available online in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology: “Activity patterns in New Kingdom Nubia: An examination of entheseal remodeling and osteoarthritis at Tombos”
• Doctoral student Ryan Plis and Dr. Evelyn Blackwood received the Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion 2012 award for the best paper in the category of Faculty research.  The paper is entitled: Trans Technologies and Identities in the United States.  It will be published in Technologies of Sexuality and Sexual Health, Lenore Manderson, editor, Routledge, 2012.
• The Spring issue of THiNK magazine features the work of several anthropology faculty members and students.  We invite you to check out the news here.
• Dr. Evelyn Blackwood and Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer presented papers at the Center for Research on Diversity and Inclusion's Spring Symposium on March 29, 2012.   Papers presented focused on cultural marginalization (Abdul Khabeer) and Trans Embodiment (Blackwood).
• Doctoral student Elizabeth Wirtz was recently awarded a Purdue Research Foundation Grant for her dissertation work "Measuring the Impact of Physical and Structural Violence on Somali Refugee Women's Perceptions of Fertility and Motherhood in Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya”

2011

• Ian Lindsay presented a talk at the 2011 Chicago Humanities Festival entitled "Can you Dig It?: Technology in the Archaeological Record."  Read more...
• Andrew Buckser has been named an American Council on Education Fellow for 2011-2012. 
• The American Anthropological Association’s Association for Queer Anthropology is very pleased to announce that Evelyn Blackwood has been awarded the 2011 Ruth Benedict Book Prize in the category “Outstanding Monograph” for Falling into the Lesbi World: Desire and Difference in Indonesia (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010). 
• Join us at the Anthropology Fall Open Houseon Friday, November 11 to learn about graduate study at Purdue!  The event will begin at 10:00am in Stone Hall Room B2 and will include a chance to learn about our MS and PhD graduate degree programs, funding options and faculty research projects. 
• Wiping Away the Tears Symposium: The Battle of Tippecanoe in History and Memory. Free and open to the public. November 3 - 5, 2011  Purdue University.
• Dr. Evelyn Blackwood was interviewed by The Daily Beast about her research among the Minangkabau in West Sumatra, Indonesia. 
• Dr. Cooper was awarded a $512,950 grant from the National Science Foundation's Arctic Social Sciences Program for a 3-year program of research titled "Prehistoric Native Copper Technology in Northwest North America: Innovation, Diffusion, and Heritage."
• Dr. Laura Zanotti returned from Brazilian Amazon, where she co-taught a study abroad course on indigenous peoples and conservation.   

2010 

• Dr. Brian Kelly has been studying the emerging methamphetamine epidemic in China. His project is focused on how the rise of methamphetamine is influencing China's HIV epidemic. Dr. Kelly has studied drug abuse and the HIV/AIDS epidemic for over a decade. 
• Dr. Kory Cooper was awarded a $5,000 Purdue Library Scholars Grant to travel to British Columbia and the Northwest Territories to continue his investigation of prehistoric native copper technology and its relationship to prestige and social complexity in the Arctic and Northwest Coast. While on teaching release in fall 2010 he traveled to the Royal British Columbia Museum, the BC Heritage Branch, the University of British Columbia, and the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre to collect data on the archaeological distribution of native copper artifacts. Prof Cooper's research provides a new perspective on technological innovation and prestige among diverse types of Hunter-Gatherer societies. 
• PhD student, Sarah Schrader, is currently doing fieldwork on Dr. Michele Buzon's NSF-funded archaeological research project in Tombos, Sudan. This season, Sarah and the team have been busy excavating Egyptian-style pyramid tombs and Nubian-style tumulus tombs that date to the Napatan Period (~700-300 BC). Exciting finds include infants buried in baskets, many intact figurines and a horse burial. 
• Giorgi Bedianashvili received a prestigious Carnegie Research Fellowship to work in the Department of Anthropology at Purdue University from September 2010 to this January. Giorgi is employed by the Tbilisi Archaeological Museum in the Republic of Georgia, so this was a great opportunity for our graduate students to get to know an international scholar. Bedianashvili pursued his project entitled "Sociopolitical Complexity and Change in Late Bronze Age Central Caucasus 1500-1000 BCE" under the guidance of Dr. Ian Lindsay. 
• Department Head Ellen Gruenbaum lectured on Alan Paton's classic novel focusing on struggles with racism and injustice in mid-20th century South Africa. Her talk, which infused history, culture, and personal reflection into the literary commentary, was part of the annual Books and Coffee series. She spoke in the South Ballroom to an audience of about 75 community and university participants.
• Dr. Michele Buzon is giving a "Back to Class" presentation entitled, "Window to the Past: Nile Valley's Civilizations Share Valuable Lessons" for the 2011 Purdue Mollenkopf Weekend, Naples, Florida.
• Graduating Anthropology Senior, Britney Yount, has been admitted to the Teach For America program. She will begin teaching in South Dakota in early 2011. 
• Students in Anthropology's new Community Engagement course, Anth 404, taught by Professor Evelyn Blackwood, recently participated in the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos) celebration hosted by the Purdue Latino Cultural Center at the local YWCA. They created and displayed a beautiful altar in memory of their deceased loved ones.(10/29/10) 
• Dr. Melissa Remis and colleague Jean Bosco Kpanou had a paper published in the Africa Journal of Ecology titled,"Primate and ungulate abundance in response to multi-use zoning and human extractive activities in a Central African Reserve."
• Doctoral candidate Brandi Wren presented her research on the behavior and gastrointestinal pareasites of vervet monkeys (Cholorcebus [Ceropithecus] aethiops) at the meeting of the International Primatological Society in Kyoto, Japan, September 2010.
• Carolyn Jost Robinson and Dr. Melissa Remis presented their poster, "Interdisciplinary approaches for the development of sustainable hunting practices in a central African forest," at the Ecological Sciences and Engineering Symposium at Purdue University, October 27, 2010.
•  Jessica Shafer (BA 02, Anthropology), Boatswain Mate 1st Class Petty Officer, US Coast Guard, was named one of the Purdue Alumni Association's 40 under 40. 
•  Dr. Ellen Gruenbaum and Dr. Laura Zanotti visited Moi University, Eldoret Kenya this June. Dr. Gruenbaum and Dr. Zanotti were hosted by Dr. Susan Chebet and explored different participatory community projects in the area.
•  Sarah Schrader has been selected as the 2010 recipient of the College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Master's Thesis Award. Her thesis is titled, "A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Activity Patterns in New Kingdom Nubia" and utilizes a bioarchaeological approach to examine activity patterns at the Nubian site of Tombos. Human skeletal remains from the New Kingdom (1,550-1,069 BC) are analyzed for indications of osteoarthritis, vertebral degeneration and entheseal remodeling. Low levels of these activity patterns reflect an imperial community that was not participating in a mechanically strenuous lifestyle. These date suggest Tombos served as a colonial administrative center as the Egyptian Empire successfully consolidated Nubia into the imperial regime of the New Kingdom. Sarah Schrader is supervised by Dr. Michele Buzon.
• Dr. Sharon Williams is working with the World Health Organization to understand how people age throughout the world. Dr. Williams is traveling to South Africa, Australia and India to work with labs, train laboratory personnel and collaborate with other scholars associated with the WHO Study of Global Aging and Adult Health (SAGE).
• Sarah Schrader has been awarded a PRF Research Assistantship (2010-2011) for the project, "Archaeology of the Everyday: A Bioarchaeological Approach to Activity Patterns and Diet of Ancient Nubians" supervised by Dr. Michele Buzon.
• Dr. Evelyn Blackwood has recently been promoted to Professor of Anthropology, effective August, 2010.
• Dr. Michele Buzon has been promoted to Associate Professor of Anthropology, effective August, 2010.
• Dr. Michele Buzon recently appeared in the program 'Nasca Lines: The Buried Secrets' on the National Geographic Channel discussing the skeletal and isotopic analysis of a decapitated individual. 
• Evelyn Blackwood was the featured speaker at Bucknell University for their Social Science Colloquium "The Anatomy of Gender: Science, Sex and Culture in the 21st Century," March 29, 2010. Her talk was entitled "Global sexualities, or are there really lesbians and gays everywhere?"
• Dr. Kory Cooper was awarded $5,000 from the Purdue University Library Scholars Grant Program to support museum and archival research for his project "Indigenous Copper Metallurgy in Northwestern North America: Innovation in Hunter-gatherer Technology."

2009

• Dr. Ian Lindsay and colleagues were awarded a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation for a project "Collaborative Research: The Fortress and the Grassroots: Archaeological Investigations of Early Complex Societies on the Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia", beginning April 2010.
• Dr. Kevin Vaughn recently appeared on the program 'Solving History with Olly Steeds' on the Discovery Channel. In the linked clip, Dr. Vaughn walks on a Nasca (Nazca) Line, or geoglyph, in southern Peru with host Olly Steeds as they discuss the function of the geoglyphs in antiquity. 
• Melissa Remis has published a new article in the journal Conservation Biology. Co-authored with Rebecca Hardin (University of Michigan), it is titled "Transvalued Species in an African Forest " (Conservation Biology 23(6): 1588-1596, 2009). 
• ANTH Senior Hannah Bergeman Attended Copenhagen for U.N. Climate Change Summit December 2009. 
• Evelyn Blackwood was a featured expert on National Geographic Channel's Taboo series. She appeared in the episode entitled "The Third Sex," which first aired in November 2008.
  
• Purdue Anthropology alumna, Kimberly Huber's (BA, '76), co-authored book, "The Museum Educator's Manual: Educators Share Successful Techniques" was recently published by AltaMira Press.
• Indiana Archaeology Month: Archaeologist Dr. Kory Cooper was interviewed about his research into the prehistoric use of copper in northwestern North America.
• Dr. Brian C Kelly was awarded a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for his project entitled "Prescription Drug Abuse in Youth Subcultures: Contexts & Risks", August 2009.
• Dr. Michele Buzon was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation for her project entitled "A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Identity Development during Napatan State Formation", July 2009.
• Dr. Kevin Vaughn was awarded a grant from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration for his project entitled "Ancient mining and metallurgy on the south coast of Peru." June, 2009.