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Watrall & Goldstein Receive Grant to Organize Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice
The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that, in collaboration with MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences, Professors Watrall and Goldstein have received a $249,708 Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to organize the Institute on Digital Archaeology Method & Practice Hosted jointly by MATRIX and the Department of Anthropology and directed by Watrall (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology; Associate Director of MATRIX) and Lynne Goldstein (Professor, Department of Anthropology), the institute will bring together 20 participants to the campus of Michigan State University for two 6…
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Watrall receives NEH Grant for next phase of the Archaeological Resources Cataloging System (ARCS) Project
The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that, in collaboration with the College of Arts and Letter and the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, and MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, Professor Ethan Watrall has received a $350,000 NEH Digital Implementation grant to continue the work on the Archaeological Resources Cataloging System (ARCS) project. The project will be co-directed by Jon Frey (Assistant Professor, Department of Art, Art History, and Design) Originally funded by an NEH Digital Startup Grant and developed as a proof of concept by a small research group in the…
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Syazana Amirulmokminin Documentary to Appear in Michigan Film Festival
We are very happy to announce that a short documentary film by Syazana Amirulmokminin, an undergraduate student in the Department of Anthropology, has been accepted into the Made in Michigan Film Festival. Entitled The New Generation, the film dives lives of two young Asian-American women and the unique challenges they face living between two cultures. Amirulmokminin produced the film as part of ANP429: Ethnographic Field Methods, taught by Professor Mara Leichtman. The Made in Michigan Film festival takes place in Frankenmuth on Oct. 3rd and 4th.
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Anthropology undergraduates among winners at 2014 MSU UURAF
Anthropology majors Kelsey Carpenter, Mari Isa, and Kyla Cools recently received honors for their research presentations at the annual MSU University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF), held at the MSU Student Union on April 4, 2014. Kelsey, Mari, and Kyla received First Place Awards in their respective sections within the Social Sciences division. Approximately 660 students presented at this year’s forum. Kelsey’s presentation, entitled Cranial Fracture Patterns in Pediatric Deaths: Homicides and Accidents (abstract on page 134) focused on differentiating between inflicted and accidental injuries in cases of infant deaths involving head trauma. Mari’s presentation, Fracture Initiation and Propagation in…
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Anthropology Graduate Student Participation at the Graduate Academic Conference
The 6th Annual Council of Graduate Students Graduate Academic Conference occurred on March 27th, 2014 at the Kellogg Center. The conference had over 150 graduate and professional students presenting at this year’s conference. Each presented in a format that conveyed complex disciplinary material to an educated but non-specialist audience, an important skill that should be developed and practiced. This year, presenters had the option of communicating their work through three different formats: ten-minute traditional presentations, poster presentations, or in the three-minute competition, an exciting new presentation format. This year, we had a record number of Anthropology graduate students participating and a…
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Anthropology Professor Chantal Tetreault Published Article in Language and Communication
We are very pleased to announce that an article by Dr Chantal Tetreault, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, has been published in Language and Culture (vol 33). Entitled “Cultural Citizenship in France and le Bled among Teens of Pan-southern Immigrant Heritage,” the article addresses discourse among French teenagers of pan-immigrant, peripheral, and specifically southern descent that evokes the widely circulating spatial concept called le bled, a French word of Arabic origin. Drawing upon theories of cultural citizenship, the paper explores the connections that teens broker through le bled in two, divergent discourses that link French citizenship with modernity and race. The first discourse…
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MSU Anthropology Major Mariyam Isa Awarded Ellis R. Kerley Award
At the 66th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Seattle in February 2014, the Ellis R. Kerley Foundation announced MSU anthropology major Mariyam (Mari) Isa as the youngest ever winner of the Ellis R. Kerley award. The Kerley Award recognizes “the paper or poster which best demonstrates originality, creativity, depth of research, innovation, new methodologies, research design, significance to the field, and/or potential impact on the practices of forensic anthropology.” Mari’s paper, titled “Fracture Initiation and Propagation in Pediatric Blunt Cranial Trauma” focused on the importance of the accurate interpretation of skull fractures, especially in cases of suspected…
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Department of Anthropology Announces 2014 Fieldwork Photo Contest Winners
The Department of Anthropology is very happy to announce the winners of the 2014 Fieldwork Photo Contest. The Fieldwork Photo Contest is intended to spread the message about the department and anthropology in general through the fieldwork photographs of faculty, students, and alumni. This year’s Fieldwork Photo Contest is particularly exciting because all of the winners are either students or alumni – a real testament to how active and engaged our students are. The winner’s photographs are posted on the department website, distributed over department social media, and displayed in the main department offices (in Baker Hall) And without further…
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Talus Released on Android
The Department of Anthropology is very happy to announce that the native Android version of Talus is now available for free from the Google Play Store. Created originally as a mobile website by Emily Niespodziewanski (PhD student in the MSU Department of Anthropology) as part of her Cultural Heritage Informatics Grad Fellowship, Talus aggregates dozens of the most commonly used bioprofiling methodologies into one easy-to-navigate mobile application. The app is designed to help forensic anthropologists, bioarchaeologists, and paleoanthropologists analyze human skeletal material without having to rely upon dozens of physical articles and books. All materials used in Talus are clearly and simply cited so that users know…
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Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia wins SfAA Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Competition
The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that PhD Candidate Fredy Rodriquez-Mejia has won the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Tourism and Heritage Student Paper Competition for his paper titled “Exploring New Paths Toward Indigenous Identity Formation: Heritage Teaching among the Ch’orti’ Maya of Copan, Honduras.” Co-Authored with Kristin Landau (archaeologist, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University), the paper discusses the collaborative effort (anthropology/archaeology) of the two authors to co-teach an introductory anthropology class at the only indigenous high school in the region of Copan. The goal of the project (as outlined in the award winning paper) was to teach a majority of indigenous students (n=20),…