Student Research Interests
Following is a list of current students and their research areas of interest. Click on a student's name for contact information.
Ph.D. Students
Coursework Stage
Sociocultural. Politics of gender and development, anthropology of knowledge and the politics of competing epistemes, feminist pedagogy, identity, sexual and gender-based violence, anthropological methods; West Africa.
Archaeology, Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. The Maya, commoners, and the construction of communities. Figurines, petrography and other material studies.
Semiotic anthropology, anthropology of disaster and loss; post-disaster trauma and social/cultural changes in relationship to the politics of memory; relationship between semiology and semiotics; Japan..
Valerie Smedile Rifkin
Archaeology. Pre-Colombian Mesoamerica. Complex societies. Archaeology of death and burial, gender, and material culture. Monte Albán, Mexico. Geographic Information Systems.
Medical and economic anthropology, epistemology, causal models, phenomenology, language and power.
Space and urbanization, housing market, shifting residential patterns and kinship relations; urban China.
Proposal Stage
Archaeology. Architecture, place-making, and the built environment; production, exchange, and ancient economies; material semiotics; categorization and systems of knowledge; ethnohistory and colonial changes in the Americas; physical anthropology and human evolution; Mesoamerica, the Andes, the Mediterranean.
Sociocultural and psychological anthropology. Performance theory, symbolic interpretation, traumatology and PTSD in cross-cultural encounters, Israeli/Palestinian conflict, theater, peacebuilding/conflict management.
Dissertation Stage
Sociocultural. Youth culture, education and nationalism in contemporary Palau, Micronesia. Postcolonial Studies. Anthropology of Science.
Linguistic anthropology. Language ideology, ethnicity and nationalism, writing systems, religion. Central Asia, Kyrgyzstan.
Sociocultural. Socialization of linguistic and ethnic identity among Czech Roma.
Sociocultural anthropology, ritualization, cultural aspects of death and dying, self-other relations, personhood, life course, gender, material culture; Swaziland, South Africa.
Medical anthropology, the body and embodiment, gender, food practices; exchange practices and Christianity in American Samoa, Samoa, and the diaspora.
Sociocultural. Reproduction, parenting and motherhood; the anthropology of media; medicalization; the South Sudanese diaspora. Postcolonial studies, transnational/diaspora studies, and critical theory.
Sociocultural. Material culture, museums, landscape, and identity. Scotland.
Political and media anthropology. Ethnographic study of the state, power, experiences and representations of violence, the legal and the illegal, border communities, journalism and media production; Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay.
Archaeology. The impact of the Classic Period Collapse on the sociopolitical and economic organization of the Postclassic Period Maya through the ceramic, lithic, and architectural analysis. Community formation, style, economic production and consumption, trade networks and exchange, and state collapse. Peten, Guatemala.
Archaeology. Mesoamerica, Maya, role of secondary and tertiary settlements in regional political organization of Classic period kingdoms, social organization, style and political affiliation, space and place, semiotics, archaeology of non-elites, household archaeology, ceramics. Peten, Guatemala.
Sexuality and gender; globalization and modernity; power, practice, agency, and resistance; civil society, social movements, and NGOs; Chinese grassroots gay men's HIV/AIDS groups. China.
Sociocultural. Immigrant communities and identity issues (American-born Chinese youth in particular); migration, ethnicity and gender; globalization and transnationalism; neocolonialism and power; United States and South East Asia.
Donald SlaterArchaeology. The Maya, Mesoamerica. Caves, portals, cosmology, iconography, and power in Central Yucatan, Mexico.
Economic anthropology. Post-socialist tourism and transitions in money, labor and property in contemporary Cuba.
Sociocultural. Medical, psychological, and linguistic anthropology. Trauma, narrative, immigration/transnationalism; public policy applications of anthropology, especially related to mental health and social services for refugee and immigrant communities. The Somali Diaspora in Kenya and the United States (Minneapolis).
M.A. Students
Ryan CollinsArchaeology, Precolumbian Mesoamerica, Maya, Semasiography, and Epigraphy. Agency and Cross cultural symbolic communication.
Economic Anthropology. Political identity and agency, nationalism, symbols of state legitimacy, globalization, anthropology of the European Union.
Meaning-making and community building through the lens of pluralistic Jewish outreach groups; United States, Argentina.
Terrance HallAnthropology of archaeology and tourism, Yucatec Maya, cultural constructions of identity, hegemony/agency/power, post-structuralism.
Alexandra HaynesMedical and Sociocultural anthropology. The embodiment of illness. The social negotiation of health, well-being, and care. Networks of experience, and the way experiences are shared. United States.
Sociocultural. Humanitarian aid, development, gender.
Brittany LongEthnicity, identity, psychological anthropology, indigenous minorities, African Diasporic communities, globalization, social tension, politics, corruption, displacement, cultural and religious hegemony, hierarchical tensions, regional tensions, pre and post colonial African cultures, Swahili culture; East Africa, Kenya.
Sociocultural and linguistic anthropology. American college students, specifically identity and community development in the first-year residence hall experience; understanding human motivation and the roots of conflict and competition.
Sociocultural, linguistic and urban anthropology. Religion and ritual, semiotics and performance, connections between culture, cognition, and communication; Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas.
Archaeology. Anthropology. Nationalism and historical identity, material culture, Orthodox Christianity, Early Middle Ages, religious syncretism; Northern Europe.
Stacy PapeSociocultural anthropology, economic anthropology, linguistic anthropology. Semiotic and performance theory of rituals, interpretation of symbolic representations in subaltern communities, European Union and globalization, theatre and cultural manifestations, border regions; France and post-French colonial settlements.
Samantha PietruszewskiArchaeology, Valley of the Oaxaca, Mesoamerica. Complex Societies. Political Economy. Ceramic Analysis.
Sociocultural. Community-based responses to structural crisis, alternative social networks, systems of exchange.
Alix SeifertSociocultural anthropology, anthropology of the body, cross-cultural narratives.
Psychological anthropology, trauma and mental illness, linguistic and racial ideologies; United States.
Sociocultural. Immigration, computer-mediated communication; East Asia.
Xingyi WangUrbanization in contemporary China, space, gender, households, citizenship, Taiwan.
Archaeology. Religious and linguistic anthropology. Power and identity, roles of language and religion in social organization, cultural constructions of gender, gender-focused political movements, archaeological hoaxes; Northern Europe (particularly the Medieval period), India.
Virtual worlds, play spaces, and their ideological locations and constructions; role playing; the fractured self and its many pieces; ethnohistory; ecological anthropology.
Joint Masters in Anthropology and Women's and Gender Studies
Sarah Bradley (Feb 2012 graduate)
Social constructions of sex, gender and sexuality; cross-cultural gendering processes; anthropology of the body; intersexuality; androgyny; language revitalization in Peru.
MaryCate Brower (Feb 2012 graduate)
Sustainable development, social inequality, gender, and sexuality; Brazil.
Sociocultural. Queer and feminist anthropologies, female aggression and sexualization in sports (particularly roller derby), gender, the body, online communities, video blogs; United States.
Islamic feminism, pluralism.
Physical anthropology. Archaeology. Gender, the body.
Gender, women in the prison industrial complex, power and social inequality, and social justice.
Keely SwanSociocultural and legal anthropology, gender, violence, feminist advocacy and lobbying at the United Nations, 'traditional values,' postcolonial national identities, social movements, civil society and human rights discourse.
Political and legal anthropology, medical anthropology, science & technology studies, gender, sexuality, feminist & social theory, critical ethnic studies, and human development & social policy; North America.