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PhD Student Andy Upton receives Wenner-Gren
Andy J. Upton has been awarded three prestigious grants to assist in the completion of his dissertation research. In 2017, he was awarded the American Anthropological Association Archaeology Division Student Membership Award; a Wenner-Gren dissertation fieldwork grant for “Modeling Networks of Interaction, Identification, and Exchange through Mississippian Period Pottery in the US Midwest,” and a National Science Foundation Archaeology Program Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant for “Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Role of Network Relationships in Intercultural Contact.” In 2016, he was awarded the Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund Individual Grant for “Factionalism, Migration, and Conflict in the Late Prehistoric Central Illinois…
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Congratulations Graduates!
Congratulations to all of our December 2017 graduates. Pictured below, our PhD grads, from left to right: Fayana Richards, Kelly Colas, Dr. O’Gorman, Ryan Klataske, Adam Haviland, Dr. Tetreault, Sharmin Sadequee, Dr. Louie, and Dr. Morgan
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Message from the Chair: Dr. Jodie O’Gorman
Fall Semester 2017 has come and gone, final grades are in, and MSU is under a blanket of snow. It was a busy and exciting semester. As I reported in the last newsletter, Dr. Fredy Rodriguez-Mejia joined the faculty in August as an undergraduate teaching-focused Assistant Professor. This fall he organized the First Annual Anthropology Undergraduate Symposium and Showcase, and it was a fantastic success. On December 7th, twenty undergraduate students with posters or PowerPoint presentations talked with faculty, graduate students, fellow undergraduates, family and friends about their research. They filled the Erickson Kiva and the excitement in the room…
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MSU Forensic Anthropology Lab
The MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory, directed by Dr. Joseph Hefner, provides some of the best forensic anthropology PhD training in the country thanks to the program’s incredible research, teaching, and service opportunities. Under the supervision of Dr. Todd Fenton, Dr. Joseph Hefner, and Dr. Carolyn Isaac, graduate students gain experience conducting public service forensic work and teaching undergraduate courses. The laboratory’s unparalleled research, primarily funded through the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), contributes to forensic sciences, biomechanical sciences and law enforcement worldwide. Over the past decade, Dr. Todd Fenton, has received three large grants totaling over $1.7 million dollars from…
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Professor Ethan Watrall Co-PI on $1.47 Million Grant from Mellon Foundation
The Department of Anthropology is very pleased to announce that Professor Ethan Watrall is one of the Principal Investigators that has been awarded a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project, entitled Enslaved: People of the Historical Slave Trade, is collaboration with MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (where Watrall serves as Associate Director) and the Department of History. The $1.47 million grant will fund the first 18-month phase of a multi-phase plan to build and launch an online platform that will link and provide access to millions of pieces of data about that transatlantic slave trade…
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Bill Derman Enjoys a Productive Retirement
Dr. Bill Derman retired from MSU in 2006, but has hardly slowed down. In fact, since moving to Norway and joining the faculty at the Norwegian University of the Life Sciences (NMBU) in the Department of International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric), his academic life has flourished. He’s started new collaborative projects and published prolifically thanks to funding from the Research Council of Norway. In 2010 he even “retired” a second time (from NMBU which has a forced retirement age), but continues to teach. His research since he left MSU has taken four tracks: land reform and land restitution in…
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Alumnae Feature: Dr. Sue Schneider
Dr. Sue Schneider’s career as an applied anthropologist has brought her new opportunities to learn and allowed her to impact the lives and well being of the communities in which she has lived and worked. Her interests have always included community health, prevention and health promotion, and her dissertation research at MSU reflected those interests: she examined women’s grassroots health organizing in Mexico, and the strategies of health promoters as they merged different healing traditions within their communities. She published a book on this research, titled “Mexican Community Health and the Politics of Health Reform” (2010). Now, she works as…
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Update from the Graduate Students of Anthropology
The Graduate Students in Anthropology (GSA) is a student-run organization with the goal of fostering community and academic opportunity among graduate students in the department. Caitlin Vogelsberg, GSA treasurer, summarizes the past year’s accomplishments. The GSA has continued to focus on providing academic support for anthropology graduate students. We awarded two more $100 Academic Enhancement Scholarships in the Fall of 2016 and just recently selected the recipients of the Spring 2017 awards. These small but helpful scholarships provide financial support for students for such things as travel funding and academic necessities (i.e., books, equipment, etc.). This January, we held the…
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Undergraduate Updates
Undergraduates Present Research Anthropology undergraduates presented their excellent research in the form of poster presentations at the 2017 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF). This is a university-wide event focused on highlighting unique and creative research endeavors of undergraduates across disciplines. Students at UURAF are mentored by faculty, and have the opportunity to present a poster or paper (oral presentation). Thirteen MSU students mentored by Anthropology faculty participated, covering topics as diverse as the racialization of Arab Americans post 9/11 (Breanna Escamilla, mentored by Najib Hourani), the analysis of carbonized food residue on ceramics (Rebecca Albert, mentored by William…
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Adjunct Feature: Dr. Terry Martin
Dr. Terry J. Martin joined the MSU Department of Anthropology as an Adjunct Professor in 2016 shortly after his retirement from the Illinois State Museum where he had been a Curator for 31 years. He completed his PhD. in archaeology from MSU in 1986 under the direction of Dr. Charles Cleland. A Michigan native, Dr. Martin’s interest in archaeology was sparked in junior high school when he visited his first archaeological excavation at a plantation over summer break. The interest that would one day become his career continued through high school, his undergraduate years at Grand Valley State University, and his…