The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Associate Professor and the Director of the MSU Campus Archaeology Program, Dr. Stacey Camp is our new Graduate Program Director. Dr. Camp sees this as an excellent opportunity to get to know incoming students and help graduate students navigate their academic programs. Dr. Camp has been in administrative roles since 2013. She enjoys solving problems and finding solutions for her colleagues, staff, and students and the opportunity to promote what her students and colleagues are doing to the wider university audience.

Dr. Camp joined MSU as an associate professor of anthropology in 2017, but she was already familiar with the department before being hired. She was a visiting National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellow at MSU in the summers of 2015 and 2016. During those two summers, she got to know Dr. Ethan Watrall and Dr. Lynne Goldstein, who were directing the NEH institute on digital archaeology that she was attending. One of Dr. Camp’s favorite things about the anthropology department is the great staff who care deeply about our students and faculty. She says, “we are really lucky to have them on our team.” She also appreciates the collegiality and sense that everyone works together for a common purpose. She said, “Everyone has been so kind to me since coming here.”

            Before coming to MSU, Dr. Camp spent nine years as a faculty member, administrator, and director of a federal archaeological repository at the University of Idaho. She says, “Moving from rural Idaho to suburban East Lansing was definitely a big cultural shift, but my MSU colleagues made the transition easier for my family.” In Idaho, she worked in a department comprised of multiple academic fields – criminology, sociology, and anthropology. She says, “there were not a lot of anthropologists in my department. At MSU, I really appreciate being in a large anthropology department with anthropologists from all sub-disciplines in a college dedicated to the social sciences.”

            Dr. Camp first learned about anthropology in high school while volunteering at a museum. She says, “I really enjoyed working with the public, so I took anthropology courses my first semester at Occidental College (“Oxy”) in Los Angeles. I was immediately hooked”. She lovingly remembers her fantastic professors and mentors at Oxy, including Dr. Elizabeth Chin (now editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist), Dr. Robin Sewell, and Dr. Jeff Tobin. While at Oxy, she attended her first archaeological field school in Ireland, directed by Illinois State University’s Dr. Charles E. Orser. She says, “I was fascinated by his community-based approach to archaeology, which is why I decided to pursue the sub-discipline of historical archaeology.”

            Dr. Camp’s archaeological research explores what citizenship and national belonging mean to communities who have been actively denied and/or dispossessed of legal and/or cultural citizenship. She looks at how these communities respond to exclusion and racism through archaeology. “Archaeology can reveal what people consumed in the past, such as what they ate or purchased. Historically dispossessed or disenfranchised communities have used consumerism to claim citizenship and national identity,” says Dr. Camp. Dr. Camp’s research has also investigated the politics of the past and what it means to preserve, curate, and present artifacts. Early in her career, she studied how government-run museums in Ireland privileged the country’s prehistory to the neglect of more contested, difficult histories, such as the Great Famine and British colonization. She continues to write about the silences and absences in museums and history books. She has a book chapter coming out next year that reviews an exhibit on civil rights and racism in American history at The Henry Ford.

            Outside of academia, Dr. Camp loves spending time outdoors, hiking, cross-country skiing, kayaking, and skiing here in Michigan with her husband and two children. She said, “I was a figure skater for most of my young life and coached on the side for many years up until moving to Michigan. I still figure-skate over at the Munn Ice Arena on the weekends”. 

            On the horizon, Dr. Camp is working on a collaborative project that explores the materiality and artwork of the COVID-19 pandemic that involves two archaeologists besides her and a cultural anthropologist. They recently published in the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology last year an article titled “Private Struggles in Public Spaces: Documenting COVID-19 Material Culture and Landscapes”. The team is currently working on two articles related to this project. One examines what it means to curate and preserve materiality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the other looks at how archaeological and ethnographic methods shifted to accommodate the ephemeral nature of materiality and artwork displayed during the COVID-19 pandemic.           

By Katie Nicpon

During the annual Midwest Archaeological Conference (MAC), Dr. Jodie O’Gorman, MSU Department of Anthropology professor, received the Distinguished Career Award that recognizes archaeologists who have demonstrated excellence and contributed significantly and regularly to the advancement of Midwestern archaeology.

“I”m honored to receive the Distinguished Career Award and I’m very grateful to those who took the time to nominate me and write in support of the nomination,” Dr. O’Gorman said. 

The award has deep meaning for O’Gorman because the MAC has been a valuable part of her professional life since graduate school. 

“I gave my first professional paper at a MAC meeting decades ago, and participating in the organization has taught me a lot over the years about professionalism and advocacy – and of course the archaeology of the midcontinent. I’ve served as a board member, secretary, and president of the organization, and helped host two of its annual meetings in East Lansing.” 

Additionally, receiving the award in La Crosse, Wisconsin held special meaning for Dr. O’Gorman because her roots are nearby on the Minnesota side of the Mississippi Valley, and she spent summers in La Crosse from 1987-1990 working for the Wisconsin State Historical Society on a complex of village sites outside the city. Her dissertation research emerged from that project.  

As part of the MAC conference, Drs. Lynne Goldstein (MSU Professor Emerita of Anthropology) and Jenn Bengtson (Associate Professor, Southeast Missouri State University) put together a symposium in her honor titled, “Migration, Gender, Foodways, and Collections in the Midwestern U.S.: Various Pathways in Honor of Jodie O’Gorman.” The symposium featured studies that explored a few of Jodie O’Gorman’s major research interests. A number of her colleagues and former students wanted to honor Jodie and highlight her significant impact on archaeology in the Midwestern U.S.

Dr. O’Gorman’s research interests have focused on Native American village life in the midcontinent of North America from about AD 1000 to 1700s. Archaeologists identify many different cultural traditions in the midcontinent during this period and she has been interested in the relationships of different groups within and between communities.

“Many people were living in substantial villages during this time and some of the villages and towns can be described as multi-ethnic,” she said. “I’m interested in how people negotiated their interactions and how ideas and practices both created and maintained relationships between people and between people and their landscape. Throughout my career, I’ve been particularly interested in how the role of women and their agency in foodways play into these interactions.” 

Dr. O’Gorman plans to retire September 1, 2023, and is beginning to reflect on her career.

“I’m very proud of the Morton Village research project I’ve been co-directing for almost 15 years now,” she reminisced. “Our field and lab work at the site has been the focus or contributed to eight dissertations and many publications have come from the research. My students, the co-PI, collaborators, and myself have come to interpret the multi-ethnic site in new ways and colleagues are realizing how important this example is to how we understand ancient patterns of Native American cultural interactions across the broader region.”

She has also spent time reflecting on the students she has taught in field schools and other archaeology courses.

“I enjoyed my time with them very much and many individuals stand out – mostly for positive reasons! I am proud of them all whether they pursued careers in archaeology or simply moved on having learned more about archaeology. I’m especially thankful for having the opportunity to work with Native American students and colleagues at MSU; they’ve helped me understand more fully the importance of different perspectives and made me a better archaeologist.”

Upon her retirement, Dr. O’Gorman plans to explore a variety of research and other interests that fell by the wayside during the past forty years. 

“But my top goal is to spend more time with my family, especially my grandchildren,” she said.  “And my partner, and enjoy our cabin in the woods, tend my gardens, fish more, read more, paint more, write different things – the list goes on.” 

Dr. O’Gorman joined the MSU Department of Anthropology in 2000 and served as the department chair for nine years. 

“We’re so grateful to Jodie for her dedication to our students, our colleagues, our community partners and the field,” Todd Fenton, Ph.D., said, professor and current department chair. “We especially appreciate Jodie’s service as our chair for nine  years. We wish her so much joy and time with loved ones during her retirement.” 

To learn more about Dr. O’Gorman, visit anthropology.msu.edu.

The Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Associate Professor Dr. Ethan Watrall has been named a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. 

Founded in 1707 and granted a royal charter in 1751, the Society of Antiquaries is based in London and charged with furthering the study and preservation of heritage and archaeology in Britain and around the world.  

The Society’s 3000 elected members include some of the most prominent scholars and professionals in heritage and archaeology, national museum directors, curators, directors of heritage preservation trusts and non-profits, and members of the UK parliament.  

Fellows are nominated internally and elected by existing members of the Society in recognition of their significant achievement in the fields of heritage and archaeology and are entitled to use the initials FSA after their names.

Dr. Watrall was nominated and elected in recognition of his work in publicly engaged digital heritage, digital preservation in heritage and archaeology, and digital museum collections.  

Dr. Watrall is the first and only Fellow elected from Michigan State University.  

The MSU Department of Anthropology welcomes Dr. Ampson Hagan as their new College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate. Dr. Hagan earned his PhD in anthropology from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and joined MSU in fall semester 2022.

“I applied to the College of Social Science Dean’s Research Associate Program at MSU because it looked like it was one of a kind,” he said. “The dedication to supporting and nurturing scholars from diverse backgrounds caught my eye, and the program’s commitment to doing the work of putting scholars in positions to succeed, with institutional resources, intrigued me.”

Dr. Hagan’s research interests surround humanitarianism and rescue, broadly focusing on how Black African migrants crossing the Sahara Desert encounter and navigate the humanitarian and policing nexus that seeks to intercept them.

He grew up watching cartoons where superheroes saved others, and then he worked in large NGOs in which people engaged in heroic acts of humanitarianism and rescue. In 2015, during his PhD research at UNC, he often saw news reports of African migrants getting stranded and shipwrecked in the Mediterranean.

“I began to wonder about the paths they took to reach the sea, and I began to see more reports of migrants stuck in the Sahara. After reading about humanitarianism in the Sahara and other regions of Niger and Algeria, I decided to go and see what I could learn about the lives of migrants in those countries.”

Over the course of 12 months of ethnographic research with unauthorized migrants and inside a migrant camp in Niger, this research is the body of his dissertation, Deserving Humans in the Desert: How Black trans-Saharan Migrants Experience the Logics of Liberal Humanism via Humanitarian Care in Transit.

He has ambivalences towards the field of humanitarianism, as well as the practice of rescue.

“The inherent politics of both are complex and involve contradictions to their stated goals,” he said. “Articulating those politics and contradictions is something I think is incredibly important. That would allow stakeholders, organizations, and governments to speak more openly and think more critically about how concepts of humanity, and understandings of who is considered human, are at stake in humanitarian rescue operations and structures.”

He thinks that the rescue as a concept needs to be critically analyzed as a tool that reflects who is worthy of being saved and who is not and that these issues are important for anthropology and for society to consider.

“I hope that others continue to question the concepts of rescue and humanitarianism on their ‘human’ grounds. A humanitarianism that fails to influence or even attempt to improve the abject and dangerous conditions that humans face, is a failure to intervene in crisis. What does that say about humanitarianism? About rescue? I want this research and its fundamental questions to exist in conversations outside of my narrow slice of academic discourse.”

In spring, he will teach ANP 330 Race, Ethnicity and Nation, and this semester, he’s focusing on writing.

“As a very new member of the department, my most meaningful experiences have been all the support from my colleagues, and all the time I have had to write!” he said.

Dr. Hagan joins the department of Anthropology as a Dean’s Research Associate, a program established in 2018 aimed at promoting an inclusive scholarly environment in which outstanding scholars in the social sciences support the advancement of diversity, equity and inclusion in the academy.

“We’re delighted that Dr. Hagan has joined our faculty and we are excited about the important perspectives and dynamic research he brings to our department,” Dr. Todd Fenton said, chair of the department.  

The Dean’s Research Associates have a minimal teaching load, will be mentored and supported, and will participate in a Dean’s Research Associate Development Institute with the goal of possibly transitioning them into tenure-system positions at MSU.

“Offering more than just words, the program has put in place institutional resources that will promote the development of scholars of color, and I am excited for the opportunity to grow as a researcher and a future faculty member at MSU,” Dr. Hagan said.

In addition to his research, writing and teaching, Dr. Hagan enjoys learning new skills.

“I want to learn how to skate. I have plenty of pursuits and skills that I want to attain in the near future and learning to in-line and roller skate are important skills to learn,” he said. “Two more things: I’d like to volunteer on a farm, and I want to learn how to drive a car with a manual transmission.”

To learn more about Dr. Hagan, visit https://anthropology.msu.edu/author/haganam1/.