Dr. Masako Fujita received a National Science Foundation grant of $120,000 to fund her project, “Breastmilk antibody and micronutrient in association with maternal nutrition and infant sex in a polygynous Ariaal society of rural Kenya.” The project will be conducted in Fujita’s Biomarker Laboratory for Anthropological Research at MSU. The project will analyze milk samples from a polygynous population from Kenya. The milk specimens were originally collected as part of another NSF-funded research collaboration between Dr. Fujita, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Washington and the Center for Public Health Research, and Kenya Medical Research Institute. In the current…

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The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announced that it will be hosting Dr. Donna Yates from October 24th to 28th.  Yates is a Lecturer in Antiquities Trafficking and Art Crime at the University of Glasgow’s Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research. An archaeologist by training, she is based out of a criminology department and is one of the founding members of the Trafficking Culture research consortium which conducts evidence-based inquiry into the global illicit trafficking of cultural objects. Her research broadly focuses on social aspects of antiquities trafficking, art crime, and related cultural property issues. Yates has recently…

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Dr. Barbara Rose Johnston, Adjunct faculty member, was selected to deliver the Michael Kearney Memorial Lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) this past spring (2016). The SfAA honors the memory of Michael Kearney by selecting an outstanding contemporary scholar to present on a topic relevant to the three themes central in his work: migration, human rights, and transnationalism. Dr. Johnston delivered the distinguished lecture titled, “Climate Change, Migration, and Biocultural Diversity – Emerging Trends, D/volutionary Tipping Points?” Dr. Johnston was also recognized by the American Anthropological Association (AAA) at the annual meeting this past November as co-winner of the 2015 Anthropology in Public Policy Award…

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Dr. Anne Ferguson and Dr. Lisa Fine (History) will be honored at the 2016 Lavender Reception and Mosaic Awards as recipients of the 2016 Beverwyk Award. The two professors are Co-Directors of the MSU Center for Gender in Global Context (GenCen) and were instrumental in the creation of the LBGTQ+ Studies minor, which became available in 2015. Deanna Hurlbert, Director of the LBGT Resource Center, writes: “Lisa and Anne have been relentless advocates for sexuality and gender scholarship at Michigan State University and demonstrated brilliant administrative leadership as the architects of LGBTQ+ Studies. As of this school year, 68 students are working towards earning…

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Kathryn Meyers Emery was recently awarded one of the highest honors a graduate student at Michigan State University can receive, the Excellence-in-Teaching Citation, presented at the All-University Awards Convocation on February 9, 2016. She was given this award for both her formal and informal teaching of students in a variety of contexts, including Introduction to Archaeology (ANP 203), the Campus Archaeology Field School, and her Graduate School boot camps on digital identity development. In a passage from her nomination, written by Dr. Lynne Goldstein, Meyers Emery was described as “enthusiastic about archaeology, well versed in digital scholarship, and passionate about…

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First place: “Layene religious ceremony” by Emily Riley. Yoff-Layene, Senegal. 2014     Second place: “Vietnamese Boats” by Edward Glayzer. Hue, Vietnam. 2012     Third place: “Peruvian Dyes” by Nicole Williams. Chinchero, Peru.     Honorable Mention: “The Duck Delivery” by Edward Glayzer.  Hue, Vietnam. 2012     Honorable Mention: “Wedding Blessing” by Emily Riley. Bambey, Senegal. 2014     Honorable Mention: “Transept with high contrast marble stripes” by Emily Streetman. Siena Cathedral, Siena, Italy. 2015     This article appears in our Spring 2016 newsletter. Read the entire newsletter here.

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This past November, Dr. Najib Hourani was invited to participate in the Harvard Arab Weekend on a panel sponsored by the Graduate School of Design.  The annual event brings together notable academics, political figures, business leaders and diplomats to discuss the pressing issues facing the Arab world.  The panel on which Hourani spoke, entitled Reconstruction and Identity, addressed an audience deeply worried that the reconstruction of Syria, Libya and Yemen may play out as yet another instance of ‘disaster capitalism,’ in which reconstruction is seen by elites and multinational corporations as a window of opportunity for neoliberal reform and private…

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Graduate student Lisa Bright was awarded the Society for California Archaeology Student Paper Competition in March (2016) for her paper titled “Differentiating Hospital Interred Individuals from the Larger Cemetery Population: The Curious Case of SCVMC’s Buttons.” She drew on data from 2012-2014 excavations of the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center Historic cemetery (circa 1875-1935), which included 1,004 individuals. Her project centered on the separation of hospital direct interred individuals from individuals buried from the larger community via artifact and spatial analysis using the presence and absence of specific buttons types and patterns. Individuals with the hospital gown button pattern trended toward clustering, and…

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