Department of Anthropology

  • Graduate Student Awards, Grants and Fellowships

    Lisa Bright received a Cultural Heritage Informatics and a Campus Archaeology Program Fellowship

    Sylvia Deskaj was awarded a NSF subsidized grant to analyze a portion of her dissertation material using the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum of Natural History, graduate student travel grant from Archaeological Institute of America, Alliances for Graduate Education and Professoriate grant, and MSU Graduate Dissertation Research Enhancement Grant.

    Hannah Feig received a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship from Center for Advanced Study of International Development (CASID).

    Julie Fleischman received the Golden Key International Honour Society Research Grant for pre-dissertation research and the Ellis R. Kerley Forensic Sciences Foundation Scholarship

    Kathryn Frederick is the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Society for American Archaeology Student Paper competition for her paper “Holes: The Beginners Guide to Food Caching”.

    Brian Geyer was awarded a FLAS Fellowship from CASID and a Cultural Heritage Initiative fellowship.

    Edward Glayzer received a FLAS Fellowship from the CASID to go to Korea and study Korean at the Sogang University in Seoul.

    Anna Christina Martinez received the Tinker Graduate Student Field Research Grant from the Tinker Foundation for her research on NGOs and Healthcare Delivery in Maya Guatemala.

    Julie Seven-Mattes received the MSU Animal Studies Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for her dissertation “Catastrophe to Awareness: A Multispecies Ethnography of Animal Rescue in Post-disaster Japan”.

    Katy Meyers Emery was awarded the Council of Graduate Students (COGS) Disciplinary Leadership Award, Campus Archaeology Program Fellowship, and Future Academic Scholars in Teaching Fellowship.

    Amy Michael was awarded the Broad Art Museum Writing Residency fellowship and a Campus Archaeology Program Fellowship.

    Meenakshi Narayan received the College of Social Science Research Scholar’s Fellowship

    Emily Niespodziewanski received the Kenneth E. and Marie J. Corey Research Enrichment Fund to support research in Italy on medieval skeletal remains, and a COGS Conference Grant.

    Marie Schaefer was selected as a graduate fellow with the Northeast Climate Science Center.

    Andy Upton was awarded a NSF grant to conduct compositional analysis at the Elemental Analysis Facility at the Field Museum of Natural History, and was selected as the R. Bruce McMillan Museum Intern with the Illinois State Museum.

    This article is in the Department of Anthropology’s Spring 2015 Newsletter, see the entire newsletter here.

  • Alumna Dr. Marita Eibl: Explores Government Opportunities

    Dr. Marita Eibl
    Dr. Marita Eibl

    Dr. Marita Eibl first became enamoured by the discipline when she did a sixth grade report on East African Anthropology. As an undergraduate at University of Notre Dame, she was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to learn about all four fields of Anthropology. During this time, she was able to conduct research in East Africa, which shaped her interests and led her to MSU, where she planned to focus on medical anthropology in Africa. Her dissertation research examined the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in Tanzania. Dr. Eibl explored how the different participants in the program viewed their roles within the broader PEPFAR operation and how local women chose to access HIV/AIDS medications through the program.

    After graduating from MSU, Dr. Eibl was selected to be a fellow in the Presidential Management Fellowship (www.PMF.gov) program, an opportunity she recommends to current graduate students interested in pursuing non-academic work. The PMF provides recent graduates with a job within an agency in the federal government with perks including an accelerated promotion track, eighty hours of training every year, and the ability to try out different jobs within the federal government. As a participant in this program, Dr. Eibl took a position at Health and Human Services for the first year and then moved to a position within the State Department. Her time as a PMF fellow provided her with a wide range of fieldwork and experience. The program has also enabled her to build a large network of contacts.

    Following this experience, Dr. Eibl was hired by the State Department to work for the PEPFAR program, which she had examined in her dissertation research. This job has provided Dr. Eibl the opportunity to travel around the world to work with representatives of African governments, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. She has also worked with HIV clinics and outreach programs.

    Dr. Eibl truly appreciated the experiences she had as a graduate student at MSU. These include the guidance provided by the connections she made within the MSU Center for Gender in Global Context, the African Studies Center, and the Center for Advanced Study of International Development (CASID), and her committee members and other professors in the department, including Dr. Anne Ferguson, Dr. Bill Derman, and Dr. Linda Hunt. She also values the feeling of community among the grad students and the support system they built to help one another advance through the program. For current graduate students, she offers this advice: “pick a subject that you will love for years, because to finish you must love it!”

    This article is in the Department of Anthropology’s Spring 2015 Newsletter, see the entire newsletter here.

  • Spring 2015 Message from the Acting Chair: Dr. Laurie Medina

    Greetings! As another academic year winds down, we are celebrating graduations. But we are also gearing up for a busy summer. Students and faculty will soon disperse to pursue research and language study in places across the world.

    On campus, the Campus Archaeology Program, directed by Dr. Lynne Goldstein, will run an archaeological field school this summer. Both the program and the field school reflect MSU’s commitment to understanding and preserving its own history, and both provide exciting opportunities for undergraduates and grad students to develop experience in research and data analysis. Meanwhile, Dr. Gabe Wrobel will lead both graduate and undergraduate students through a field school in archaeology and bioarchaeology in Belize, focusing on ancient Maya populations. While some grad students will travel to Korea, Ghana and Tanzania to pursue advanced study of Korean, Twi, and Swahili, others will travel to Taiwan, Italy, and the Middle East or across the US Midwest to explore opportunities for dissertation research and conduct preliminary studies.

    The department will also offer a growing suite of online courses during the summer, which provide opportunities for undergraduate students to access and engage courses in a flexible format and opportunities for graduate students to develop online teaching skills, an increasingly important dimension of their teaching portfolios. In August, Drs. Ethan Watrall and Lynne Goldstein will lead an NEH Summer Institute on Digital Archaeology Method and Practice, reflecting the importance of Cultural Heritage Informatics as a new area of strength and focus within the department. I hope you will enjoy the opportunity to catch up with the work of current students, alumni, and faculty through the pages of this newsletter!

  • Undergraduate Peer Mentor positions available for Summer 2015 online class ISS 215 “Navigating U.S. Culture”

    The MSU Department of Anthropology is accepting applications from students interested in being Undergraduate Peer Mentors in a 200-level ISS online class focused on exploring social and cultural diversity in the United States. Peer mentors work with groups of about 10–15 students to encourage them to stay engaged with class materials and assignments. You should gain valuable experience serving as a peer mentor in an online MSU class, where you will have some flexibility to creatively use online media to support a small group of learners. You will also gain expertise in cross-cultural relations, a skill increasingly valued by employers in a globalized, interdependent world.

    Role and duties

    Undergraduate Peer Mentors will work online with groups of ten to fifteen enrolled students to help them better connect with each other and the course materials, so as to help them better achieve the three primary learning goals of this class:

    1. Exploring U.S. culture and society to help international students better adapt to life in the United States, understand their experiences here, and understand what affects how they are perceived in the U.S.;
    2. Helping domestic U.S. students better understand their own culture and society from a more detached point of view, and how the U.S. is experienced by a variety of “outsiders”.
    3. Overall, to become more culturally self-aware and able to navigate other cultures.

    To do this you will be expected to:

    Facilitate and comment on (but not grade) student participation in online assignments;
    Provide weekly and end of the course reports regarding course issues; encourage students to communicate questions and concerns to you, which you can anonymously relay to the TA or professor;

    Use your personal experiences and knowledge of the basics of sociocultural anthropology to facilitate student discussion of class topics in various online media such as Facebook;

    Use your personal experiences and knowledge as a student to give the instructor feedback about course materials (what’s interesting, what’s working/not working, are assignments clear and reasonable, etc.); Contribute at least twice during the term to the “Peer Mentor” blog, which will both incorporate your personal experiences relating to course topics as well as summaries and highlights of student related experiences and writings that you’ve gleaned from student assignments;
    Communicate and exchange ideas with other mentors and instructor/TA, both in an in person meeting TBA before class starts, and via required weekly scheduled meetings (video if you are not at MSU this summer; you are encouraged to attend in person if your are on campus this summer session 1).

    As a peer mentor, you will earn a $300 stipend and a certificate of completion upon satisfactory completion of your duties. The minimum time commitment is: one two hour meeting on campus before the spring semester ends in order to orient yourself to the course and your duties; 5–7

    hours of work per week between May 18 and July 2, which can be done online (i.e. you do not have to be living in East Lansing to do this; you just need to have a computer and an internet connection).

    Application procedure

    Priority will be given to anthropology majors, minors or cognates, and secondarily to applicants who have completed substantial coursework in sociocultural anthropology.

    Other coursework related to U.S. culture and society is a plus, as is experience working with international student issues (but neither is required). Experience using WordPress and using social media/digital tools to facilitate group work in an educational/work setting will be helpful but is not required (though you will have to learn to use at least WordPress). If you participated satisfactorily as a mentor in US 14, you are eligible to apply again. To apply, please email by May 1 to Professor Adán Quan (quan@msu.edu) a short statement of interest, including:

    1. Name
    2. Year and major
    3. Sociocultural anthropology courses taken (as well as any other relevant coursework, training, or experiences)
    4. One or two paragraphs explaining your interest in this position and your background and experiences will help you be an effective mentor; mentioning one or two specific concepts or readings from a previous class that you feel are relevant to this class topic.

  • Department of Anthropology Undergraduate Student Joshua Schnell Wins Prestigious Beinecke Scholarship

    Joshua Schnell
    Joshua Schnell

    The Department of Anthropology is very proud to announce that Joshua Schnell has been awarded the highly prestigious and competitive Beinecke Scholarship. Founded in 1971, the Beinecke Scholarship supports students pursuing graduate studies in the arts, humanities and social sciences.

    Joshua Schnell, a junior, is an Honors College member studying Anthropology and Religious Studies. He has always been passionate about anthropology and archaeology. He spent his childhood reading his grandpa’s National Geographic magazines and every book ancient civilizations book he could find. His love of bones stretches back as far as he can remember- collecting and cleaning animal bones he found in the forest as a kid. His interests were taken a step further during a high school World History class where he learned more about pursuing archaeology.

    Joshua has taken advantage of every opportunity to get more involved within the discipline and to learn more about anthropology broadly. He works in the MSU Bioarchaeology Lab run by Dr. Gabriel Wrobel and is working on his own research, which he presented at the Society for American Archaeology meeting. He is also involved with the Undergraduate Anthropology Club, and became the club’s webmaster during his freshman year, as president last year, and is now the treasurer. Additionally, Joshua has worked with the Campus Archaeology Program since his freshman year. Two summers on CAP’s excavation team provided the basis for research on the historic use of space on MSU’s campus, which he presented at the 2014 University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum.

    Joshua is also working with Dr. Lynne Goldstein to conduct a spatial analysis of Aztalan, a Mississippian site, which he presented at the 2015 UURAF in April. This summer, Joshua will attend Dr. Wrobel’s Maya Culture History Fieldschool in Belize. There, he will be excavating at an ancient Maya rockshelter cemetery site and a surface civic-ceremonial site, as well as surveying several cave sites.

    Joshua plans to attend graduate school, and get into a PhD program in bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology, or Mesoamerican archaeology. Joshua wants to investigate the relationship between ritual and space, particularly from a mortuary perspective, how space is used for ritual, how ideas of sacred space and ritual landscapes are constructed, the modification of natural landscapes for ritual purposes, and the role landscape plays in a culture’s worldview or cosmology.

  • Professor Hefner Appointed to the American Board of Forensic Anthropology Board of Directors

    The American Board of Forensic Anthropology announced last week that it has appointed Dr. Joseph T. Hefner to its Board of Directors, effective July 1st. His term will last through July 2018. The American Board of Forensic Anthropology was incorporated in 1977 to function in much the same way as certifying boards in various medical specialties and other scientific fields. Diplomates of the ABFA are recognized for their special qualifications in forensic anthropology and for meeting the highest standards in the field. As an appointed member of the Board of Directors, Dr. Hefner will be instrumental in establishing and maintaining the standards of the field

  • Kathryn Frederick- Honorable Mention 2015 Society for American Archaeology Student Paper Competition

    Kathryn Frederick is the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2015 Society for American Archaeology Student Paper competition for her presentation “Holes: The Beginners Guide to Food Caching”. Kate was/will be honored at the Annual Awards Ceremony in San Francisco. This is only the second Honorable Mention since the inception of the Student Paper competition, attesting to the strength of her research. “Holes . . .” reports on the results of three years of subterranean food caching experiments eventually resulting in five months of underground food storage that passed modern food safety standards. Kate’s work was assisted by collaboration with Professor Leslie Bourquin from the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition. All food safety analyses were run at the MSU Diagnostic Center for Population and Animal Health with funding from an avocational donor. Two cycles of the experiments were conducted through a partnership with the City of Lansing Fenner Arboretum. Kate’s award winning research will form one component of her doctoral dissertation.

  • MSU Anthropology Undergraduates at UURAF

    The annual University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF) took place Friday, April 10, 2015 in the MSU Union. The Department of Anthropology was represented by five undergraduate students who presented their original research to the broader MSU community. All the undergraduates did an excellent job presenting their work. Presentations included:

    Rebecca Albert: “Burnt to a Crisp- Using Charred Food Remains on pottery to Reconstruct the Plant Diet”

    Allison Apland: “Pathways Between Food Insecurity and Serum Folate Status Through Coping Strategies: A Case Study Among Breastfeeding Women in Drought Stricken Northern Kenya”

    Kyla Cools: “Patterns of Change”

    Taylor Flaherty: “Determining Sex Using Discriminate Functioning of the Human Mandible”

    Joshua Schnell: “Mississippian Landscapes: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Landscapes and the Formation and Modification of Cultural Landscapes at Major Mississippian Sites, 800-1300 CE”

    Joshua Schnell: “3D Skulls: A Comparative Study of 3D Model Generation Techniques and Their Relative Accuracy for Digital Cranial Osteometry”

  • Lisa Bright awarded the College of Social Science Research Scholars Fellowship

    We are happy to announce that PhD student Lisa Bright has been awarded the College of Social Science Research Scholars Fellowship for Summer 2015.  This award, open only to students completing their first year of doctoral study, is awarded to students who demonstrate strong preparation and aspiration towards a career in social science research.  Lisa will use the award to travel to San Jose, California and begin archival research on her dissertation site.  The funds will also be used to purchase digital camera equipment to be used for digitizing historical documents at the archives.

  • 2015 Anthropology Photo Contest Winners

    2015 Anthropology Photo Contest Winners

    photo

    First Place: Sabrina Perlman, “Football in a Fishing Village”, Ghana 2014

     

    Glayzer4

    Second Place: Edward Glazer, “All Weather Billiards in China”, Qinghai Province, China, 2011

     

    Deskaj1

    Third Place: Sylvia Deskaj, “Mountains”, Albania, 2014

     

    Honorable Mentions go to:

    Ann Martinez, “Dia de Santiago”, Antigua, Guatemala, 2014

    Katy Meyers Emery, “Mayan Flying Dancers”, Mexico, 2015

    Thanks to all the participants, and congratulations to this year’s winners!