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College Recognizes PhD Student Micayla Spiros as Outstanding Researcher
This spring, PhD student Micayla Spiros received the inaugural College of Social Science Graduate Student Research Award. This award is presented to one graduate student from the entire College of Social Science who initiates and conducts original research and demonstrates a clear potential for continued research excellence. Spiros is a graduate student in the MSU Forensic Anthropology Laboratory (MSUFAL) who studies how variation in the human skeleton can aid in the identification of unknown remains. Spiros’s research focuses on macromorphoscopic (MMS) variation in the postcranial skeleton, which involves examining the expression of human variation in the skeleton below the skull.…
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Dr. Chantal Tetreault Receives Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Award
Associate Professor Chantal Tetreault has won a coveted Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program Award. Dr. Tetreault specializes in linguistic and cultural anthropology and her recent work has primarily focused on issues of migration and social change in France. More generally, her research illuminates how cultural processes of identity construction are achieved through everyday language use. Dr. Tetreault’s award will support her research project, “What is Arabic Good For? Future Directions and Current Challenges of Arabic Language Educational Reform in France.” Currently, only 0.2% of all middle and high school students who take a second language in France have access to Arabic,…
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Dr. Mara Leichtman Awarded Fellowship of the Luce/ACLS Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs
Dr. Mara Leichtman has been awarded a prestigious fellowship of the Luce/American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Program in Religion, Journalism & International Affairs. Dr. Leichtman is an Associate Professor of Anthropology affiliated with the Muslim Studies Program, African Studies Center, and Asian Studies Center. Her research interests focus on the interconnections among religion, migration, politics, and economic development through examining Muslim institutions and the communities they serve. Luce/ACLS Fellowships support scholars in the humanities and social sciences pursuing research on any aspect of religion in international contexts with a desire to convey their specialist knowledge to the media. The…
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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 Dr. 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…