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Dr. Gabriel Sanchez Awarded National Geographic Grant
Dr. Gabriel Sanchez has been awarded a National Geographic Early Career Grant in support of his collaborative and eco-archaeological research with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. Their project, “Archaeology as Conservation Science: Investigating the Historical Range of California’s Endangered Coho Salmon” employs archaeological data to inform contemporary salmon management by identifying the native range of salmon species and their presence in specific coastal streams. Dr. Sanchez joined the Department as a College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate and specializes in Indigenous and environmental archaeology. Working through the lens of historical ecology, he studies ancient fisheries along the Pacific Coast…
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Dr. Heather Howard Receives Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship
Associate Professor Heather Howard has been awarded a distinguished Whiting Public Engagement Fellowship. The Whiting Public Engagement Program is a national grant that advances scholarly work applying the humanities in ways that benefit communities. The program’s fellowships recognize faculty whose work interacts with the public and brings together discussion on topics of significance. Dr. Howard’s work focuses on collaborative, community-based, and participatory approaches to research which promote the value of Indigenous knowledge frameworks to scholarship. Dr. Howard is one of only six Fellows awarded across the country this year. The fellowship, in the form of $50,000, will support Dr. Howard’s…
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Dr. Stacey Camp and Ethan Watrall Awarded National Park Service Grant
Associate Professors Stacey Camp and Ethan Watrall were awarded a three-year National Park Service Japanese American Confinement Sites (JACS) grant for $379,017 to develop The Internment Archaeology Digital Archive (IADA). The IADA is an open digital archive that will host, preserve, and provide broad public access to digitized collections of archaeological materials, archival documents, oral histories, and ephemera that speak to the experiences of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II in the United States. This digital archive will focus on two sites of WWII incarceration located in Idaho: (1) the Minidoka National Historic Site, where the Minidoka War Relocation…
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Dr. Andrea Louie Wins National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
Dr. Andrea Louie, Professor of Anthropology and founding director of the Asian Pacific American Studies Program at MSU, has been awarded a competitive 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. The NEH Fellowship, worth $60,000, will support Dr. Louie to fully engage in her yearlong research project, culminating in a book titled Chinese American Mothering Across Generations: Toy Len Goon and the Creation and Recirculation of the Model Minority Myth (under contract with New York University Press). For her research, Dr. Louie will investigate the multiple narratives surrounding the story of Toy Len Goon, a Chinese immigrant who was selected…
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Dr. Linda Hunt Retires from the Department
Dr. Linda Hunt retired from the Department this spring after a remarkable career specializing in medical anthropology. Dr. Hunt attributes her early interest in anthropology to growing up in an eclectic household, with a Mexican catholic mother and New York Jewish father in an Irish-catholic neighborhood. With the diverse perspectives and realities surrounding her, she was always interested in understanding the conflicts and resolutions this fomented. After studying anthropology at Wayne State University, Dr. Hunt earned her PhD from Harvard University in 1992. Dr. Hunt joined the MSU Department of Anthropology in 1999 and attained Full Professor status in 2008.…
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Message from the Chair: Dr. Todd Fenton
For the past several months, Michigan State University has been responding to the COVID-19 crisis in accordance with directives from government and health officials. This emergency initiated an immediate reaction across campus in March to switch our courses and work to remote alternatives. The tremendous effort and patience in adapting to this situation from across the Department of Anthropology deserves profound recognition. Our faculty and graduate teaching assistants quickly modified courses to online platforms so that our students could resume their studies for the remainder of the year with the least amount of interruption possible. Our undergraduate students continued to…
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Alumni & Friends of Archaeology and William A. Lovis Research Awards
The Department of Anthropology Alumni and Friends of Archaeology Expendable Fund and William A. Lovis Research Fund in Environmental Archaeology were awarded to PhD student Emily Milton. Marking its third year, the Alumni and Friends of Archaeology research award was established to enhance research and learning of undergraduate and graduate students in our archaeology program. This was the inaugural year for the William A. Lovis endowment, which celebrates Dr. Lovis’s commitment to research, specifically to that examining human-environment interactions prior to Euro-American colonization episodes worldwide. The funds from these awards enabled Milton to travel to Peru last summer and finish…
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PhD Student Brian Geyer Receives Fulbright
Graduate student Brian Geyer received a 2019 Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) award to investigate how aspects of Kenya tech sector professionals’ identities—including gender, ethnicity, religion, and socioeconomic status—affect their positions of social, political, and economic power in the sector. This March, Geyer will leave for Kenya and split one year between technology innovation hubs in Nairobi and Kisumu. During this time, he will engage with a diversity of educational and professional organizations, such as computer science programs at several Kenyan universities and tech start-ups. Currently, international development organizations often take a gender-based approach to projects, due to studies…
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Forensic Anthropology Lab Instructs State Police
This fall, the MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory (MSUFAL) led a week-long training course for the Michigan State Police (MSP) on the analyses of human remains in the forensic death investigation. During this course, Michigan police from across the state learned about what information can be gained with forensic anthropology, how the methods involved in examining human remains are used, and how to properly excavate human remains from a burial so that evidence about the case is not lost. The first two days of the course involved lectures on forensic anthropological methods. These lectures were given by anthropology faculty Dr. Joseph…
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Undergrad Spotlight: Clara Devota
Boozhoo-Aaniin. I am currently in my senior year majoring in Anthropology with a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies. My academic interests lie in the intersection of physical anthropology and museum studies, with a focus on the status of NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) remains in museum collections and Indigenous community–museum relationships. Last summer, I worked on the North American Human Remains Care and Curation Project at the Field Museum of Natural History as the Mullins-Martin North American Biological Anthropology Intern. During my time at the Field, I performed osteological analysis on approximately 150 catalogue numbers…