Department of Anthropology

  • Dr. Helen Pollard: Retires from the Department

    Dr. Helen Perlstein Pollard has wanted to be an archaeologist as long as she can remember. Despite her occasional thoughts of being a tightrope walker or ballerina, her focus never changed. When it came time to choose a college she decided to attend Barnard College. During the summer after her first year in college, she used her savings to pay for an archaeological field school in the Southwest through UCLA. The following summer she taught at the field school, this time in Northern California, and also worked for the California Highway Department in a salvage project studying shell midden sites…

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  • Winter 2014 Featured Faculty Member: Dr. Mara Leichtman

    Mara Leichtman decided that she wanted to be an anthropologist during an internship with Citibank Maghreb in Casablanca. She had taken a year off from pursuing her Master’s degree in International Relations at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies to live and work in Morocco. She brought with her a number of books, including the memoirs of Clifford Geertz. Reading Geertz in Morocco was inspirational, as was visiting Sefrou, the town where many anthropologists had conducted fieldwork. Dr. Leichtman decided to pursue her Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology at Brown University. There she studied the Lebanese community in West…

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  • Welcome the New Undergraduate Advisor: Jackie Lillis-Warwick

    The Department of Anthropology is proud to introduce our new Undergraduate Advisor, Jackie Lillis-Warwick. Jackie has been a proud MSU Spartan since she was an undergraduate student here. She graduated from MSU in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology, and then pursued her masters from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Anthropology and Museum Studies.  Following graduation, she worked for the cultural research management company, Commonwealth Cultural Resources Group, in the Midwest for six years. She was excited to return to MSU to assume the position of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act collections manager for the MSU…

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  • Message from the Chair: Dr. Jodie O’Gorman

    Summer of 2013 the department launched the seventh and eighth courses in our planned expansion of online course offerings. These courses are important for a number of reasons. In today’s world many students find an online course helps them fit more into their schedule, graduate sooner, and some simply prefer the venue.  Some students find online courses give them more, or a different kind of opportunity to be interactive with their instructor and classmates. There are also innovative ways of presenting content that are not possible in a classroom setting. Our graduate students teach most of these courses in the…

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  • Dr. Linda Hunt and Dr. Heather Howard Awarded NIH Grant

    Dr. Linda Hunt and Dr. Heather Howard have been awarded a major National Institute of Health (NIH) grant to study the complex relationships between electronic health records, genomic concepts, clinical decision-making, and patient self-perception. Their study is designed to: 1) Examine how clinicians integrate genomic concepts with their existing understandings of racial identity, risk and responsibility, 2) Understand how patients interpret these complex concepts, and 3) Examine how electronic health records systems may promote concepts of biological racial/ethnic difference, and the consequences of these practices for individual clinicians and patients. The focus of the study will be diabetes management clinics…

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