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A.J. Faas is an anthropologist who researches politics and cooperation in contexts of disasters, displacement, and resettlement in Latin America and the United States. He received his Ph.D. from the University of South Florida and is currently an associate professor of anthropology at San José State University. Faas is the author of In the Shadow of Tungurahua: Disaster Politics in Highland Ecuador. He is working on community science approaches to disaster vulnerability in the San Francisco Bay Area. Follow him on Twitter @ajfaas.
Aaron Gerry is a freelance journalist based in Boston, Massachusetts. He often writes about the impact of sport on outdoor economies and rural development. He has contributed to ESPN, Climbing, and Rock and Ice.
Aaron Gronstal is an astrobiologist specializing in geomicrobiology and an illustrator who explores the use of comic art in communicating scientific concepts. Other work includes the Astrobiology Graphic History series produced for NASA. Follow him on Twitter @AaronGronstal.
Aaron J. Jackson is a teaching associate at the University of Melbourne in Australia. His research focuses on fatherhood, care, and disability. His book Worlds of Care: The Emotional Lives of Fathers Caring for Children With Disabilities explores the emotional and practical realities of fathers caring for children with major cognitive disabilities in North America. He also writes about care and illness. Follow him on Twitter @Kodacruz.
Aaron Martin is a filmmaker based in Detroit, Michigan. He has produced work for international publications, national news shows, and local theaters
Aaron McCanna is an Indigenous decolonization specialist who lives in Seattle, Washington. He received his M.A. in public archaeology from the University of New Mexico and is currently working at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. His goals are to utilize the ideas and values in decolonization to help create a better, more sustainable world for everyone, especially Indigenous peoples. His current work focuses on decolonizing language and processes to facilitate healthier relationships between people, work, and land.
Abdul-Aliy Muhammad is an organizer and writer born and raised in West Philadelphia. Follow them on Twitter @MxAbdulAliy.
Abigail Chabitnoy is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (forthcoming, Wesleyan 2022); How to Dress a Fish, shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award; and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light. She currently teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts low-residency MFA program and is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Chabitnoy is a member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak, Alaska. She has an MFA in poetry and a B.A. in English and anthropology.
Abigail Desmond is a lecturer in human evolutionary biology at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on technology, human evolution, and human cognition, among others. She is a Paleolithic archaeologist and received her D.Phil. and M.Phil. degrees from the University of Oxford. Desmond’s research focuses on the intersection of technology, biology, and cognition, particularly in the human lineage.
Abrona Lee Pandi Aden teaches in the English department at Sikkim University, India. She is interested in the politics of representation surrounding gender and Indigeneity in literature. She belongs to the Lepcha community Indigenous to Sikkim and the Darjeeling Hills. Some of her short stories and poems have appeared in Muse India, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, and Mekong Review.
Adam Brumm is a professor of archaeology and a former Australian Research Council future fellow at Griffith University in Queensland. He completed his Ph.D. in archaeology at the Australian National University in 2007. Brumm’s archaeological research focuses on the deep-time story of humans in Indonesia, especially in Wallacea, the vast zone of oceanic islands lying east of continental Asia and the gateway to ancient Australia.
Adam Fleischmann studies the people and processes working at the intersections of climate change politics, science, and technology. He is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at McGill University in Montreal, where he received his M.A. in 2015. Fleischmann is a section editor at the Society for Cultural Anthropology, where he has also been a contributing editor since 2018. Follow him on Twitter @afleisch_anthro.
Adam Gamwell is a design anthropologist whose research and consulting work focuses on agricultural biodiversity conservation, environmental design, and Peruvian quinoa. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Brandeis University. He is currently the host, creative director, and executive producer of This Anthro Life Podcast, a public education initiative to bring social science tools and insights to wider publics. He is also a freelance ethnographic and design consultant. Follow him on Twitter @gamwell and @thisanthrolife, or on LinkedIn.
Adam Kersch earned his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Davis, in 2022. His work examines the interplay between Whiteness, infectious diseases, settler colonialism, and race over the course of 200 years in Sheet’ká (Sitka), Alaska. Using ethnographic and historical methods, Kersch’s community-oriented research outlines how ideas about disease and race affected colonial public health programs.
Adam Netzer Zimmer is a biocultural anthropologist based in Reykjavík, Iceland. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMass). Zimmer’s dissertation research focuses on the rise of race-based anatomical science in 19th- and early 20th-century Iceland and the U.S. His work has been supported by a Fulbright-National Science Foundation Arctic Research Grant, an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Armelagos-Swedlund Biocultural Anthropology Dissertation Award, and a Leifur Eiríksson Foundation Fellowship. Previously, Zimmer was the laboratory manager for the UMass Taphonomic Research Facility and is currently the co-primary director of the Rivulus Dominarum Transylvanian Bioarchaeology Project in Romania.
Adam T. Smith is the Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in Anthropology at Cornell University. He is also the director of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies. In 1998, Smith co-founded Project ArAGATS, a long-term program of archaeological investigations in Armenia. In 2020, he co-founded Caucasus Heritage Watch with Lori Khatchadourian and Ian Lindsay to explore the potential of heritage forensics to deter cultural erasure. He is the author of The Political Landscape and The Political Machine, among other books and articles. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from a range of institutions, including the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Adhi Agus Oktaviana is a researcher at Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional (the National Archaeological Research Center), Ministry of Education and Culture, in Indonesia. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Oktaviana’s research focuses on ancient rock art in Indonesia.
Adrie Kusserow is a medical and psychological anthropologist whose research and teaching focus on refugee health and healing. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and her M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School. Kusserow is the author of American Individualisms, Hunting Down the Monk, Refuge, and The Trauma Mantras: A Memoir in Prose Poems. She works with Afghan refugee resettlement in Burlington, Vermont, where she teaches at St. Michael’s College.
Adrienne Strong is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on maternal mortality in health facilities in the Rukwa region of Tanzania and on the ways in which history, political economics, and the social environments of institutions come together to influence maternal health. She is also interested in respectful maternity care and health system financing. Her research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the P.E.O. Sisterhood. Follow her on Twitter @AdrienneStrong.
Agustín Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. He focuses on the biosocial, delving into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. Earning his B.A./B.S. in anthropology and zoology and his M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, he has conducted research across four continents, multiple species, and 2 million years of human history. His current projects include exploring cooperation, creativity, and belief in human evolution, multispecies anthropologies, evolutionary theory and processes, sex/gender, and engaging race and racism. Fuentes’ books include Race, Monogamy, and Other Lies They Told You: Busting Myths About Human Nature, The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional, and Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being.
AJ Kluck (they/them/čniłč) is an interdisciplinary artist living in Mohkínstsis, Treaty 7 in Alberta, Canada. Their mother is Irish, and their father is sqilxʷ. Kluck’s practice is rooted in building slow and gentle relationships with the land and community, healing intergenerational trauma, processing their identity as a sk̓ʷsk̓ʷtmsqiltk (half-blood) person, and celebrating and reconnecting with sylix ways of being and knowing. Kluck is currently studying sculpture at the Alberta University of the Arts.
Aja Lans is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Inequality in America Initiative. She completed her Ph.D. in anthropology and cultural heritage preservation at Syracuse University with funding from the Ford Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. Her research integrates Black feminist and critical race theory with bioarchaeological investigations. Lans is also interested in museum collections, the objectification of human remains, and the history of race. She is investigating the remains of Black people curated in Harvard University’s Peabody Museum with support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Outside of the academy, she consults as a bioarchaeologist on cultural resource management projects in New York City. Follow her on Twitter @aja_lans.
Alan Goodman, a professor of biological anthropology at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, writes on the health consequences of poverty, inequality, and racism. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and was a postdoctoral fellow in international nutrition at the Salvador Zubirán National Institute of Health Sciences and Nutrition in Mexico, and a research fellow in stress physiology at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. Goodman is the editor or author of eight books, including Race: Are We So Different? (with Yolanda Moses and Joseph Jones), Building a New Biocultural Synthesis (with Thomas Leatherman), and Nutritional Anthropology (with Darna Dufour and Gretel Pelto). He was the vice president for academic affairs and a past president of the American Anthropological Association, where he co-directs its public education project on race. (Author photo courtesy of Neil Stillings.) Follow him on Twitter @AHGoodman18.
Alan Sandstrom is a professor emeritus of anthropology at Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He is the author of Corn Is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village and a co-author of Pilgrimage to Broken Mountain: Nahua Sacred Journeys in Mexico’s Huasteca Veracruzana, Traditional Papermaking and Paper Cult Figures of Mexico (both with Pamela Effrein Sandstrom), and Ethnic Identity in Nahua Mesoamerica (with Frances Berdan and others). He is also a co-editor of three collected works on Mesoamerican healers, Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast of Mexico, and the anthropology of Protestantism in Mexico and Central America, and a past editor of the Nahua Newsletter. He researches cultural ecology, cultural materialism, economic anthropology, the history and theory of anthropology, and Mesoamerican religion and ritual.
Alessandra Prunotto is an early career researcher with an interest in urban space, mobilities, climate change adaptation, and public health. She earned a bachelor’s in anthropology from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and currently works in a market and social research company. Prunotto is the secretary of the Australian Network of Student Anthropologists and advocates for greater commitment to public anthropology.
Alex Hinton is a distinguished professor of anthropology, the director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, and the UNESCO chair in genocide prevention at Rutgers University. He is the award-winning author or editor of 17 books, including, most recently, It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the U.S., Anthropological Witness: Lessons From the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and Perpetrators: Encountering Humanity’s Dark Side (with Antonius C.G.M. Robben). Hinton is the recipient of the American Anthropological Association’s 2009 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology and 2022 Anthropology in Media Award. In 2016, he testified as an expert witness at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia. Follow him on Twitter at @AlexLHinton.
Alex Nelson is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies transformations in gender and intimacy in South Korea and the ethnology of romantic love. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and is an adjunct assistant professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. Nelson is also engaged in collaborative interdisciplinary research on commercial sexual economies, including the Erotic Entrepreneurs Project, a study of the business and safety strategies of erotic escorts in the U.S., and the Virtual Sexual Economies Project, a study of ethno-erotic economies and racial inequalities in the webcam modeling industry. Follow him on Twitter @alexjnelson.
Alexander Piel is a lecturer in anthropology at University College London, focusing on primate behavior and ecology. He has worked in West and East Africa, and is currently co-directing with Fiona Stewart the Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation project, based in western Tanzania. Piel’s specific interests center on primate vocalization behavior and overall primate adaptations to a savanna-woodland environment.
Alexander S. Dent is the chair of the anthropology department at George Washington University. He is a linguistic anthropologist who studies mediation, intellectual property, music, and authoritarianism in Brazil and the United States. His first book, River of Tears: Country Music, Memory, and Modernity in Brazil, analyzed rural public culture in Brazil from 1998–2009. His second book, Digital Pirates: Policing Intellectual Property in Brazil, analyzes digital media piracy and capitalism. Dent is currently working on a history of early punk rock in Brazil and is collaborating with Joshua A. Bell and Joel C. Kuipers on a study funded by the National Science Foundation on teenage cellphone use in Washington, D.C. He is also in a practicing band called Weird Babies.
Alexander Werth teaches biology, anthropology, and writing at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. He studied zoology, anthropology, and philosophy at Duke University, then earned a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University, with a focus on mammalian anatomy. Werth conducted research at the Duke Primate (now Lemur) Center and the New England Regional Primate Center. His research also focuses on marine mammal functional morphology (specifically feeding in toothed and baleen whales) and the evolution of complex structures. His scholarly work has been published in many peer-reviewed journals and highlighted in popular media. He is currently writing a book about the perils of teleological thinking.
Alexandra Brewis studies how stigma and other forms of social exclusion shape human biology, with a special focus on the health challenges of obesity and climate change. Her books include Obesity: Cultural and Biocultural Perspectives. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona and now serves as the director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University (ASU), where she is also a president’s professor. To leverage social science research in advancing workable and sustainable solutions to local community-identified health challenges, Brewis co-leads the Mayo Clinic–ASU Obesity Solutions initiative. She blogs about stigma (with Amber Wutich) at lazycrazydisgusting.com.
Alexandra Jones, the founder and chief executive officer of Archaeology in the Community, focuses her educational work on community outreach and service. She is currently an assistant professor of archaeology at Goucher College in Maryland. Her B.A. and M.A. are from Howard University, and she earned her Ph.D. in historical archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2010. In 2013, Jones worked for PBS’ television show Time Team America as the archaeology field school director. She serves on the District of Columbia’s historic preservation review board, on the board of directors for the Society of Black Archaeologists, and on the board of directors for the St. Croix Archaeological Society. She is also an academic trustee for the Archaeological Institute of America.
Alexandra Kralick is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She studies the growth and development of sex differences in the great ape and human skeleton in the subdiscipline of biological anthropology. Her previous work is on gorilla dental development and wrist bone shape. Kralick is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. She earned her B.S. in biological anthropology from George Washington University. Follow her on Twitter @BioAnthFunFacts.
Alexandra Mack is a senior fellow in Pitney Bowes’ Strategic Technology and Innovation Center. Her work is focused on developing ideas for new products, services, and technologies based on a deep understanding of work practice. She has worked on different projects across business units, bringing user-centered approaches to product development and innovation in health care, retail, software, and financial services industries as well as nonprofits. Prior to coming to Pitney Bowes, Mack worked for a small design consulting firm and also spent several years consulting in marketing and strategic research, combining qualitative and quantitative techniques. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from Arizona State University. Follow her on Twitter @lxmack.
Alexandra Woods is a digital art historian and senior lecturer in the department of history and archaeology at Macquarie University in Australia. Woods draws on approaches from anthropology, museum studies, the history of science, and digital humanities to study ancient Egyptian visual culture in archives, media representations, and museum collections. Follow her on Twitter @MQAlexW.
Alicia Colson is an archaeologist and ethnohistorian who collaborates with Indigenous people to understand the ways in which they perceive their pasts. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University and is a research fellow at the University of Central Lancashire in the U.K. and an EC50 with The Explorers Club. Colson is also a co-founding editor of Exploration Revealed and a co-founder of the Institute of Science and Technology’s AI (Artificial Intelligence) Group. She is currently working with George Kenny, an Anishinaabe Knowledge Keeper from Lac Seul First Nation, his son Mike Auksi, and others in the Teaching Circle on a project partially funded by an Engaged Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation on Animism: An Insider’s View. Follow her on the social platform X @colson_alicia.
Alison Abbott is a science journalist based in Munich, Germany. She contributes regularly to Nature. Follow her on Twitter @Alison_C_Abbott.
Alison Crowther is a senior lecturer in archaeology at The University of Queensland in Australia, where she received her doctoral degree in 2009. Her research interests include the archaeobotany of early agriculture in Africa and the Indo-Pacific, trans-regional maritime trade and crop transfers, and ancient food processing technologies. Crowther’s current research investigates the origins and development of Indian Ocean trade and interaction with a focus on coastal East Africa, where she has conducted extensive fieldwork since 2010 with the Sealinks Project. She has received research funding from the Australian Research Council.
Alison Heller is a medical anthropologist who studies reproductive health and humanitarianism in West Africa. She received her Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis and is currently a traveling faculty member for the International Honors Program (IHP)/Comparative Program run by World Learning. Before starting as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, she will complete a fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Heller’s research has been funded by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Alison Klevnäs is a mortuary archaeologist based in the department of archaeology and classical studies at Stockholm University in Sweden. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2010. Klevnäs is currently leading a project funded by the Swedish Research Council on customs of reopening burials in early medieval Europe. She also serves as a co-editor of Current Swedish Archaeology.
Alison Kyra Carter is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Oregon. She is an anthropological archaeologist with an interest in the political economy and evolution of complex societies in Southeast Asia. Carter has been undertaking archaeological research in Cambodia since 2005. Her current project is focused on the Angkorian civilization of Cambodia from the ninth to the 15th centuries. Specifically, she is trying to understand the daily lives of non-elite members of society by studying their households and occupation areas.
Alistair Pike is a professor of archaeological sciences at the University of Southampton in England.
Alla Katsnelson is a freelance science writer and editor based in Northampton, Massachusetts. She writes about biology, medicine, technology, and the methods and tools that power the scientific process. Her work has been published in Nature, Scientific American, BBC Science Focus Magazine, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @lalakat.
Allison Mickel is an assistant professor of anthropology at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and the author of Why Those Who Shovel Are Silent: A History of Local Archaeological Knowledge and Labor. Her research focuses on conditions for locally hired laborers on archaeological excavations, especially in the Middle East. She has excavated in Jordan, Turkey, Kenya, and the U.S. As an activist, Mickel has served in leadership roles for POWER Lehigh Valley, Women’s March Pennsylvania, and Lehigh Valley Stands Up.
Alma Gottlieb is a professor emerita of anthropology, African studies, and gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Follow her on Twitter @almagottlieb.
Alma Simba is a writer, historian, and experimental sound artist interested in both the potentials and failures of words in capturing the human experience. Her subject matter is ancestral heritage and how Indigenous Black Africans can communicate and explore this history through oral traditions, memory, and imagination. Simba was awarded a B.A. in international history from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and she completed her M.A. in history at the University of Dar es Salaam with a focus on Tanzanian heritage housed in Germany. She was a “Sensitive Provenances” Research Fellow at the University of Göttingen in 2022 and is part of the Ajabu Ajabu audio-visual collection in Dar es Salaam. Follow her on Instagram @aa_noun.
Alyshia Gálvez is a cultural and medical anthropologist and a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is the author of the recent book Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico, which is about changing food policies, systems, and practices in Mexico and Mexican communities in the United States. She was the founding director of the Jaime Lucero Mexican Studies Institute at CUNY and is the author of two previous books on Mexican migration, Patient Citizens, Immigrant Mothers: Mexican Women, Public Prenatal Care, and the Birth Weight Paradox (winner of the 2012 ALLA Book Award from the Association of Latino and Latin American Anthropologists) and Guadalupe in New York: Devotion and the Struggle for Citizenship Rights Among Mexican Immigrants.
Amaia Arranz-Otaegui is an archaeobotanist who specializes in the late Epipaleolithic and early Neolithic of southwest Asia. Her research focuses on topics such as plant domestication, plant subsistence, vegetation change, and human impact. She has worked extensively in several countries, including Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iran. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of the Basque Country in Spain in 2015, and she is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
Amanda Grace Santos is an archaeologist working with the Continental Divide Trail Coalition in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She received her master’s in archaeology from Boston University. Her research interests include landscape archaeology, place-based pedagogy, public archaeology, and social resistance in ancient Roman provinces. Through her research, she hopes to understand the physical manifestations of community across cultures and time. Santos is also passionate about conservation education, climate justice, trains, and literature as a form of resistance to governments, social frameworks, and more.
Amanda J. Guzmán is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in archaeology and minors in Latin American history and the Spanish language. Her dissertation project focuses on a range of major museums to analyze the history of North American museum collecting in, and representations of, Puerto Rico. In the context of Puerto Rico’s current environmental and economic uncertainty, her dissertation critically traces understudied museum acquisition narratives documenting the island’s material relations with the U.S. mainland. Guzmán’s research has been supported by the Smithsonian Institution’s Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology, a Smithsonian Institution graduate student fellowship, a Smithsonian Institution predoctoral student fellowship, and the Mellon Mays graduate initiatives program. She is the author of the recently published Museum Anthropology article, “Collecting the Puerto Rican Colony: Spanish-American War Material Encounters Between Officer-Wives and Puerto Ricans.”
Prior to becoming the managing editor of SAPIENS in May 2015, Amanda Mascarelli spent more than a decade as a freelance science journalist. She has written about oil spills, autism, the neuroscience of magic, the biological complexity of sex and gender, and many other topics, and her reporting has taken her around the world. Her work appears in Audubon, Nature, Science, Science News for Students, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. Mascarelli earned an undergraduate degree in biology and a master’s in journalism, and spent several years doing biology research before becoming a writer and editor. She lives with her husband and three children in Denver, Colorado.
Amanda Votta is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Brown University in Rhode Island. She received her M.A. from Brandeis University in 2019. Her work explores the effects of opioid prescribing changes on chronic pain sufferers and conceptions of drug use and dependence in the U.S. Votta aims to add nuance to understandings of dependence and to current perceptions of the medical and nonmedical use of opioids in North America.
Amber Dance is an award-winning freelance science journalist based in Southern California. She earned a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California, San Diego, before retraining as a journalist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She enjoys covering topics beyond her life-sciences comfort zone and contributes to a variety of publications. Follow her on Twitter @amberldance.
Amber Wutich is the director of the Center for Global Health at Arizona State University and a faculty member in the university’s anthropology program. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida. Her research examines institutional injustice and health disparities, with a focus on water and food. Wutich directs the Global Ethnohydrology Study, a cross-cultural study of water knowledge and institutions in 10 countries. Her teaching has been recognized with the Arizona Professor of the Year Award, which is sponsored by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. She serves as the associate editor of Field Methods and teaches in the National Science Foundation’s programs in research methods in anthropology. She blogs (with Alexandra Brewis Slade) at lazycrazydisgusting.com. Follow her on Twitter @awutich.
Amira Mittermaier is an anthropologist who studies Islam in Egypt. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is currently an associate professor in religious studies and anthropology at the University of Toronto. She is the author of the award-winning book Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Currently she is working on a project, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, that examines Islamic practices of giving against the backdrop of the 2011 Egyptian uprising and its aftermath.
Amy Hanes is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at Brandeis University. She studies care between species—namely humans and orphaned chimpanzees—in primate sanctuaries in Cameroon. Touch, race, morality, and postcolonial theory are central themes in her work. Her research in Cameroon was funded by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Hanes is a 2018 Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. Follow her on Twitter @AmyHanes7.
Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa teaches religious studies and Asian studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Originally from Aotearoa, she works on Buddhist material culture in the Himalayas.
Amy Mosig Way is an Australian archaeologist who supports community-driven archaeological projects. She is a stone artifact specialist who studies the richness of past human behavior through high-resolution lithic analysis. Way holds a joint position with the Australian Museum and University of Sydney.
Amy Starecheski is a cultural anthropologist and oral historian whose research focuses on the use of oral history in social movements and the politics of urban property. She is the co-director of the oral history master of arts program at Columbia University. She received a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where she was a public humanities fellow. She is the author of Ours to Lose: When Squatters Became Homeowners in New York City and is currently working on a public sound-art project about the Lower East Side using oral histories with squatters.
Anand Pandian is a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. His recent books include A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times and Crumpled Paper Boat: Experiments in Ethnographic Writing. Pandian is working on a new book about indifference in contemporary American life—the everyday arrangements that allow cruelty to harbor in the most banal of circumstances. Follow him on Twitter @anandspandian. Any views stated on this site are Pandian’s own and do not express the position or views of Johns Hopkins University.
Anastasia Riehl is a linguist with a Ph.D. from Cornell University. She is currently the director of the Strathy Language Unit at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her work with endangered languages has taken her to Indonesia and Vanuatu, as well as to the city of Toronto, where she directs a project to document the endangered heritage languages of immigrant communities.
Andrea Malaya M. Ragragio is an anthropologist and archaeologist who works with Manobo communities in the Pantaron mountain range, southern Mindanao, the Philippines. She is a faculty member of the department of social sciences at the University of the Philippines in Mindanao and is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. In 2018, Ragragio received an Early Career Grant from the National Geographic Society to study Manobo tattooing. Follow her on Twitter @AMRagragio.
Andrew Curry is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany. He covers science, history, culture, and politics (pretty much in that order) for a wide variety of publications, including Archaeology, National Geographic, Science, and Wired. His work has been included in The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies and awarded prizes by the German Foreign Ministry. He recently lost his glasses while bodysurfing in the Pacific Ocean and was optimistic enough to look for them on the beach the next morning, just in case.
Andrew Fairbairn is a professor of archaeology at the University of Queensland in Australia. He specializes in ancient agriculture, human landscape change, and plant economies, and has worked in Europe, Southwest Asia, and the Australia-Pacific region.
Andrew Flachs researches food and agriculture systems, exploring genetically modified crops, heirloom seeds, and our own microbiomes. An assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University in Indiana, his work among farmers in the American Midwest, the Balkans, and South India investigates ecological knowledge and technological change in agricultural systems spanning Cleveland urban gardens and Indian genetically modified cotton fields. He is the author of Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability, and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India and is a co-editor of the journal Ethnobiology Letters. Follow him on Twitter @drflachsophone.
Andrew Ofstehage completed his Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2018. His training engages agronomy and anthropology, and his research on transnational soybean farmers in Brazil focuses on themes of work, land, and value. Ofstehage is currently a postdoctoral associate in development sociology at Cornell University, where he is pursuing research on the socio-material life of soil and agriculture.
Andrew Roddick is an associate professor of anthropology at McMaster University. He has worked in the Bolivian highlands for 15 years, conducting archaeological research principally focused on the Tiwanaku civilization and its precursors. Roddick is currently working on the Challapata Project, among others, an effort that investigates ancient villages in the eastern Lake Titicaca basin. He is also directing an ethnoarchaeological project with highland Bolivian contemporary potters. Roddick recently co-edited two books, Knowledge in Motion: Making Communities and Constellations of Practice Across Time and Place (with Ann B. Stahl) and Constructions of Time and History in the Pre-Columbian Andes (with Edward Swenson).
Ang Dolma Sherpa is a social entrepreneur who won the top “ideator” award at Idea Studio Nepal 2019 for her concept of biodegradable khatak, or scarves. The platform led her to initiate Utpala Craft in 2020, creating a shift from synthetic prayer flags and khatak to biodegradable ones.
Angela Garcia is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate researcher in biological anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She holds a B.A. in sociology from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and an M.A. in biological anthropology from UCSB. Her research uses evolutionary and biocultural approaches to explain social disparities in health. Her dissertation looks at the interplay of social and biological factors on disease risk among immigrants on the island of Utila, Honduras. She is the author of a manuscript (in press) that focuses on the relationship between perceived socioeconomic status and diurnal cortisol levels in people who live on Utila.
Anita Hannig is an anthropologist who studies illness, death, and dying from a cultural perspective. She is an associate professor at Brandeis University, where she teaches classes on medicine, religion, and the end of life. Her most recent book, The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America, investigates how medical assistance in dying is transforming the ways people in the U.S. die. Her writing has appeared in Cognoscenti, The Conversation, and The Seattle Times, among other publications.
Ann McGrath is director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. She researches gender and colonialism in the United States and Australia. She wrote How to Write History That People Want to Read (with Ann Curthoys) and the prize-winning ‘Born in the Cattle’: Aborigines in Cattle Country. She co-directed the film Message From Mungo (with Andrew Pike) and edited Long History, Deep Time: Deepening Histories of Place (with Mary Anne Jebb). Her latest book, published in 2015, is Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia. Follow her on Twitter @annmcgrath5.
Anna Antoniou is an anthropologist and archaeologist who draws on a mix of storytelling and four-field methods to help communities across the globe regain crucial parts of their cultural heritage. As a Cypriot American, she brought her academic interests home through a 400-mile ethnographic walk around Cyprus that explored the cultural and political dynamics of the division on the island. Her current research uses an archaeological understanding of past foodways to serve Indigenous communities in Washington state in their efforts to revitalize traditional foodways. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is the 2021–2022 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative postdoctoral fellow at the American Philosophical Society.
Anna Florin is a postdoctoral research fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge, and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge. She is also an associate investigator at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of Wollongong. Florin studies charred food scraps from ancient fireplaces to understand the diets of people in the past. Her Ph.D. research focused on archaeobotanical analysis at Madjedbebe, a 65,000-year-old site on Mirarr Country in Northern Australia. She is researching the role of plant foods in early human migrations out of Africa and the complexity of long-term human-plant interactions within Indigenous communities in Australia, New Guinea, and Island Southeast Asia.
Anna L. Jordan is a psychological anthropologist whose areas of interest include subjectivity and identity, ethics and morality, and power and inequality. She is a program manager for Imoyase Community Support Services, a nonprofit organization committed to community-based participatory action research, where she evaluates alternatives to youth incarceration. While earning her Ph.D. from Washington State University, she studied psychocultural experiences of morality in the U.S. criminal legal system through ethnographic fieldwork with formerly incarcerated people and former gang members in Los Angeles. Jordan is a founding member of the nonprofit CURE California, which is dedicated to criminal justice reform.
Anna Lakó is an ethnographic photographer with an interest in Transylvanian minority groups. She is an undergraduate double majoring in cinematography, photography, and media, and ethnography at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj Napoca, Romania.
Anna Luisa Daigneault is a linguistic anthropologist, a researcher, a writer, and an artist. She holds an M.Sc. in linguistic anthropology from Université de Montréal. She currently resides in the United States and serves as the program director for the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. Daigneault has conducted ethnolinguistic fieldwork throughout the Americas and in the Pacific Islands, and has contributed to the publication of more than 30 online Talking Dictionaries for endangered and minority languages around the world. She has been published by The Dominion, Global Voices, and SAPIENS. Follow her on Twitter @anna_daigneault and @livingtongues.
Annah Zhu is a political ecologist who studies conservation and development in Madagascar from an ethnographic perspective. Her work, informed by the fields of anthropology, geography, and environmental studies, focuses specifically on Madagascar’s trade in natural resources with China. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, and she holds an M.A. from Duke University. In May, American Ethnologist published her most recent article, “Hot Money, Cold Beer: Navigating the Vanilla and Rosewood Export Economies in Northeastern Madagascar.”
Annalisa Bolin is a postdoctoral fellow in the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University in Sweden. Her research focuses on the ethics and politics of cultural heritage, especially in Rwanda. Her most recent projects include a study of community relations to heritage resources in Nyanza District (with David Nkusi) and an investigation of how heritage mediates the postcolonial relationship between Rwanda and Germany. Bolin has a Ph.D. in anthropology from Stanford University. Follow her on Twitter @bolinresearch.
Annelies Moors is an anthropologist at the University of Amsterdam and the principal investigator of the European Research Council advanced grant “Problematizing ‘Muslim Marriages’: Ambiguities and Contestations.”
Annemieke Milks is an honorary research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London. Her research is centered on the archaeology of Pleistocene humans, and, in particular, subsistence behaviors and technologies. Milks’ expertise is in hunting technologies, with a specific focus on the use of wood. She has conducted experimental work on the ballistics of early weapons in collaboration with Cranfield Defence and Security, the Defense Academy of the U.K., and Loughborough University.
Annie Tucker received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, where she designed and taught new classes on autism and neurodiversity for the disability studies minor. She is a researcher and writer for Elemental Productions and is an award-winning translator of Indonesian literature. Her most recent co-authored book is Widening the Frame With Visual Psychological Anthropology: Perspectives on Trauma, Gendered Violence, and Stigma in Indonesia (with Robert Lemelson). Tucker and Lemelson are currently working on a book exploring autism in Indonesia through the lens of visual psychological anthropology.
Anthony Sinclair is a professor of archaeological theory and method in the archaeology, classics, and Egyptology department at the University of Liverpool in the U.K. He conducts research into the archaeological record of the first modern humans and their immediate ancestors, and has conducted field research in Western Europe, Southern Africa, and Arabia. Sinclair is currently working on a large-scale scientometric study of archaeology and its relationship to cognate disciplines between 1960 and 2020 using bibliometric data and science mapping.
Antonio Montañés Jiménez is a non-Rroma Spanish anthropologist and sociologist with an interest in the study of Rroma people, Christianity, and social movements. He is a Margarita Salas postdoctoral fellow affiliated with the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford and a member of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Previously, he held an Economic and Social Research Council postdoctoral fellowship at the University of St. Andrews.
Aoife Daly is the principal investigator of the project Northern Europe’s Timber Resource—Chronology, Origin, and Exploitation. This project builds a multidisciplinary team to analyze the material and written evidence for timber usage over six centuries (1100–1700). The region of origin of timber is being analyzed using several scientific methods, some of which are experimental. Identifying the timber source and the timber destination and using the high precision dating that dendrochronology provides, she studies the changes, through time, in the availability and exploitation of this essential resource.
Aparecida Vilaça is a professor of social anthropology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. She has come and gone among the Wari’ people in Amazonia since 1986. Among other books, she is the author of Strange Enemies: Indigenous Agency and Scenes of Encounters in Amazonia, Praying and Preying: Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia, and Paletó and Me: Memories of My Indigenous Father. Vilaça is also a co-editor of Science in the Forest, Science in the Past (with Geoffrey Lloyd). Like many Brazilian anthropologists, she is dedicated to the continual fight for the protection of Indigenous peoples’ rights in Amazonia.
April Nowell received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Paleolithic archaeologist and a professor of anthropology at the University of Victoria in Canada. Currently, she directs an international team of researchers in the study of Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan, and is known for her publications on cognitive archaeology, the archaeology of children, Paleolithic art, and the relationship between science, pop culture, and the media. She is a co-editor of Stone Tools and the Evolution of Human Cognition (with Iain Davidson) and Archaeology of the Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World (with Nancy Gonlin). Watch her TEDx talk: “Paleo Porn.”
April Zhu is a freelance journalist and writer based in Nairobi, Kenya, and a senior editor at Guernica magazine. She is also the producer of Until Everyone Is Free, a Sheng’ (Kenya’s urban patois) podcast on the life and work of Goan-Kenyan socialist and freedom fighter Pio Gama Pinto.
Arba Bekteshi is an urban anthropologist, cultural researcher, and artist. Her work focuses on changing urban landscapes, negotiations of public and private spaces, citizen agency, and understandings of immanence in documentary film. Bekteshi uses multimodal and sensory ethnography, psychogeography, cartography, and other forms of arts-based research to engage with the ethnographic field. She holds an M.A. in the anthropology of development and social transformation from the University of Sussex, an M.A. in international communication from IULM University in Italy, and an M.Sc. in archaeology from the University of Tirana. She teaches part-time at the University of Tirana.
Ariel Sophia Bardi is a multimedia journalist and researcher based in South Asia. Her work has appeared in BBC, The Guardian, Slate, Roads & Kingdoms, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Quartz, and Vice.
Ariel Taivalkoski teaches at Stockton University in New Jersey and is the avifaunal analyst for the Unalaska Sea Ice Project at Boston University. She examines long-term human-environment dynamics, with interests in experimental archaeology, paleopathology, and ethno-ornithology. Taivalkoski’s current research focuses on the relationship between the ancestral people of the Aleutian Islands, the ancestral Unangax̂, and animals. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals, and she maintains the Aleutian Zooarchaeology Group blog.
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Ashvina Patel is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department at Southern Methodist University. She recently concluded an ethnographic study of three urban refugee settlements in New Delhi, India, to understand how issues of geopolitics and domestic policy inform various types of human insecurity for refugees. She is currently a visiting student fellow at Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre, where she is developing further publications on Rohingya refugee displacement.
Astrid A. Noterman has been affiliated with Sweden’s Stockholm University as part of a project funded by the Swedish Research Council titled “Interacting With the Dead: Belief and Conflict in Early Medieval Europe,” led by Alison Klevnäs. Noterman’s ongoing research centers on early medieval grave reopening, Merovingian historiography, and 19th-century archaeology and its implications for the construction of French identity. She is also a collaborative member of the Center for Medieval Studies, a mixed research unit managed by the University of Poitiers and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
Ather Zia is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. She is an associate professor in the department of anthropology and the gender studies program at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley. Zia is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and a co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective. She is also a co-editor of Cultural Anthropology. She is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir, which won the 2020 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Honorable Mention Award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award, and Advocate of the Year Award 2021. And she is a co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak? (with Nitasha Kaul), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (with Haley Duschinski, Mona Bhan, and Cynthia Mahmood), and A Desolation Called Peace (with Javaid Iqbal Bhat). Zia has published a poetry collection titled The Frame, and her ethnographic poetry won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and was featured as a SAPIENS poetry contest winner in 2020.
Augusta X. Thomson is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at New York University, where she is currently working on a Fulbright-supported dissertation project along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Her ethnographic fieldwork has been supported by The Council for European Studies, the SVA/Robert Lemelson Foundation Fellowship Program, Fulbright, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Thomson is the director of Nine-Story Mountain, a documentary/autoethnographic record of a pilgrimage to and around Mount Kailash in the far west of Tibet, and flotsam, a short film about the haunted Flatbush shoreline of Dead Horse Bay. She has written for Religion and Politics, The Daily Beast, Women in the World, HuffPost, Al Jazeera English, The New Internationalist, and Wellesley Magazine, among other publications.
Austin “Chad” Hill is an archaeologist whose research focuses on the Neolithic, Chalcolithic, and Early Bronze Age periods of the Near East, with specializations in remote sensing, GIS, advanced image processing, and faunal analysis. He is a postdoctoral fellow in the Penn Paleoecology Lab in the department of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and a visiting scholar in the Spatial Archaeometry Lab in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College. He is a co-director of the National Science Foundation-funded Kites in Context project. Follow him on Twitter @Achiii.
Ayesha Fuentes is an objects conservator and material historian specializing in the care of archaeological and ethnographic collections. She is a graduate of the UCLA/Getty master’s program in the conservation of cultural heritage, and she earned a Ph.D. from SOAS University of London, where she wrote her dissertation on the use of human remains in Tibetan and Himalayan ritual objects. Fuentes is the Isaac Newton Trust Research Associate in Conservation at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.
Aysha Navest holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern Studies (with a specialization in Arabic) from the University of Amsterdam, and she is an independent researcher.
Azuka Nzegwu holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, interpretation, and culture from Binghamton University. Her research focused on virtual whirlpools as new sites of knowledge that are reshaping the old politics of knowledge production. Nzegwu also explores how ancient spirituality can assist us in dealing with the ups and downs of our lives. She draws on the principles of African spirituality to inform her work. To that end, she guest edited two special issues on the African-based practices of Vodou and Santeria in the Americas for the peer-reviewed publications Journal on African Philosophy and JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies. She interviewed practitioners about their personal journey, growth, and insights. The interviews add to a growing body of research that debunks assumptions and stereotypes about African spirituality. Nzegwu hopes to combine her training and spiritual insights to bring about positive change in the world.
Barbara Fraser is a freelance journalist from the United States who has lived in Peru for more than 25 years. She specializes in issues related to the environment, public health, and Indigenous peoples. Her work has appeared in Nature, Science, EcoAméricas, Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, The Lancet, Mongabay, and other publications.
Barbara J. King is an anthropologist emerita at William & Mary. She is the author of How Animals Grieve and a TED talk speaker on animal love and grief.
Barry Yeoman is a freelance journalist living in Durham, North Carolina, who specializes in putting a human face on complex social issues. His articles have appeared in Popular Science, Audubon, The Saturday Evening Post, Parade, The American Prospect, and many other publications, and he is the author of The Gutbucket King, a multimedia narrative about the New Orleans bluesman Little Freddie King.
Basil Farraj is a Palestinian anthropologist researching violence, torture, and resistance in Palestine and beyond. He is an assistant professor in the department of philosophy and cultural studies at Birzeit University, Palestine. Basil has published on topics related to carcerality and conducted research in several countries, including Chile, Colombia, and Palestine. He is working on a research project funded by the Arab Council for the Social Sciences that explores the global circulation of carceral policies and practices. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @basilafarraj.
Basran Burhan is a freelance archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He is interested in the modern human dispersal through Wallacea, the oceanic islands lying east of continental Asia. Burhan’s research speciality is in geo-archaeology.
Ben Belek is a social and medical anthropologist. He holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge and an M.Sc. in medical sociology and anthropology from the University of Amsterdam. His research projects have focused on questions concerning subjectivity, activism, and the ontological status of neurological diversity among autistic adults in the U.K. In another project, he engaged with the shifting values of blood constituents in the Israeli blood economy. Belek is currently involved in sustainable policy design, acting as impact manager for the Israel Society of Ecology and Environmental Sciences.
Ben Bridges is a dual Ph.D. candidate in folklore and anthropology at Indiana University. His dissertation focuses on the intersection of traditional Alaska Native arts, environmental change, and harvesting regulations in Southeast Alaska. Bridges currently serves as a visiting scholar with the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau. Follow him on Instagram @benbridges81.
Ben Leeming is chair of history at The Rivers School, a private high school outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1996. Since completing his Ph.D. in anthropology, Leeming has also worked as a practicing ethnohistorian whose independent scholarship focuses on early colonial Mexico and the missionary Nahuatl writings of Franciscans and Nahuas who produced the earliest translations of Christianity in the Americas. In 2020, Leeming was awarded an NEH Fellowship to translate an early collection of Nahuatl sermons written in the 1540s by a team of Nahua scholars under the direction of eminent Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún.
Ben Marwick is an associate professor of archaeology at the University of Washington, where he also supervises the geoarchaeology laboratory. His main research activities combine models from evolutionary ecology with analyses of archaeological evidence to investigate past human behavior.
Ben Thomas is the author of several books, a producer of a range of documentaries, and a globe-trotting journalist covering culture, history, and science. He specializes in telling stories from the frontiers of science, history, culture, and geography—and the ways in which all these things come together.
Beni Sumer Yanthan (Yanbeni) is an Indigenous tribal scholar from Nagaland, India. She is an assistant professor of English and cultural studies at Nagaland University. Her areas of specialization include the study of oral tradition, language studies, and the vernacular literature of Nagaland. In addition to poetry, she writes essays, short stories, and book reviews. Her work has been featured in The Bangalore Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine, Outlook India, and Raiot, among other publications.
Benjamin Hollenbach is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of queerness, inclusive practice, and Christian churches in the United States. He earned his Ph.D. from the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he is now a lecturer. With funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, he conducted more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in queer-affirming congregations in Michigan, exploring how LGBTQ+ Christians advocate for themselves in church settings.
Benjamin Schoville is a research fellow in the Centre for Heritage and Culture at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and previously was a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Queensland. He held a Centre of Excellence in Palaeosciences postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, after receiving his Ph.D. from Arizona State University. Through field excavations and rigorous experimental studies, his research has led to major discoveries of stone-tipped spears from 500,000 years ago and complex stone tool technologies from 72,000 years ago. Schoville’s current project explores the southern Kalahari Basin for early modern human archaeological and paleoanthropological remains and includes excavations at middle Stone Age sites at Ga-Mohana Hill and on the Tswalu Kalahari Reserve.
Bernard Wood is the University Professor of Human Origins at George Washington University. He is the author or a co-author of 20 books ranging from a 1991 door-stopper monograph on the hominid cranial remains from Koobi Fora to the nontechnical Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction. Wood also authored more than 240 scientific articles and book chapters, and a slew of commentaries in Nature and other journals. His research interests are taxonomy, phylogeny reconstruction, and comparative morphology. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Beth L. Leech is a professor of political science at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Her research and teaching focus on interest groups and social movements and how those organizations form, cooperate, and compete in the public policy process. Leech received her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University. She is the author of Lobbyists at Work and a co-author of the books Basic Interests: The Importance of Groups in Politics and in Political Science (with Frank R. Baumgartner), Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why (with Frank R. Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, and David C. Kimball), and Meeting at Grand Central: Understanding the Social and Evolutionary Roots of Cooperation (with Lee Cronk). Her current project, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is a comparative study of the policy agendas of interest groups and the public in four Western democracies.
Bhoomika Joshi is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Yale University. Her dissertation research examines the attachments of love, hurt, and mobility in the making of a region and its critical demography in the Indian Himalayas. She is the author of the recently published Hindi novel Lachchhi: The Newness of Nostalgia. Follow her on Twitter @bhoomikajoshi.
Bilinda Straight is a cultural anthropologist who works with northern Kenyan pastoralists on issues relating to warfare, emotion, gender, and health. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is a professor of anthropology at Western Michigan University. She is currently working on a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, that examines potential DNA methylation changes associated with maternal exposure to extreme drought in a context of violence. Her work builds upon similar research with warfare combatants.
Bill Schindler is an internationally known archaeologist, primitive technologist, and chef. He founded and directs the Eastern Shore Food Lab with a mission to preserve and revive ancestral dietary approaches to create a nourishing, ethical, and sustainable food system, and is an adjunct associate professor of archaeology at University College Dublin. Schindler’s work is currently the focus of Wired magazine’s YouTube series Basic Instincts and Food Science, and he co-starred in the National Geographic Channel series The Great Human Race, which aired in 2016 in 171 countries. He has also been featured on CNN, Maryland Public Television, NPR’s Weekend Edition and Here and Now, and on such podcasts as Milk Street Radio, Peak Human, and The Academic Minute. Schindler’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The London Times, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter @DrBillSchindler.
Blanca Begert is a writer and multimedia producer with a background in environmental anthropology. She covers forest management, environmental conflict, climate change, and environmental justice issues in the U.S. and Latin America. Begert holds a master of environmental science degree from the Yale School of the Environment and has conducted research on policies affecting Indigenous peoples’ land rights and livelihoods with the Center for International Forestry Research in Peru. She is currently an environment editor and video producer with KCET | PBS SoCal in Los Angeles.
Brad Weiss is a professor of anthropology at the College of William & Mary. He has conducted extensive fieldwork on social transformation in rural and urban Tanzania, and on contemporary American food systems in North Carolina. Weiss is the author of four books, including Real Pigs: Shifting Values in the Field of Local Pork. He is an incoming editor of the journal Cultural Anthropology.
Bree Kelly earned a master’s degree in Egyptology and digital humanities from Macquarie University in Australia. Her thesis explored how the Fabricius Workbench by Google Arts and Culture might improve aspects of Egyptological research and the teaching of hieroglyphic Egyptian. Her interests lie in how machine learning and AI can be harnessed to improve or enhance research practices and higher education. Kelly is also interested in studying prominent ancient Egyptian figures, such as Hatshepsut and Akhenaten, and analyzing how their lives have been interpreted by previous scholars.
Brendan Borrell is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, New York. He writes for Bloomberg Businessweek, Nature, Outside, Scientific American, and many other publications, and is a co-author (with ecologist Manuel Molles) of the textbook Environment: Science, Issues, Solutions. Follow him on Twitter @bborrell.
Brendan H. O’Connor, a lifelong fan of the Kansas City Royals, is a linguistic anthropologist and anthropologist of education. He studies issues of language, identity, and education in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, primarily in relation to Mexican American and other Latinx students and families. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and is currently an associate professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. O’Connor’s academic writing has appeared in many journals, including Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Journal of Latinos and Education, and Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.
Brendane A. Tynes (she/her) is a Black queer feminist scholar and storyteller from Columbia, South Carolina. As a doctoral candidate in anthropology at Columbia University, she studies the affective responses of Black women and girls to multiple forms of violence within grassroots Black political movements. Her scholarship has received generous support from the CAETR, Ford Foundation, and Wenner-Gren Foundation. She works with the Say Her Name Coalition and In Our Names Network to address sexual violence against Black women, femmes, girls, and gender-expansive people. Tynes also co-hosts the Zora’s Daughters Podcast, a Black feminist anthropological intervention on popular culture and issues that concern Black women and queer and trans people. Follow her on Twitter @brendanetynes.
Brenna R. Hassett is a bioarchaeologist at University College London and a scientific associate at the Natural History Museum, London. She is the author of Growing Up Human: The Evolution of Childhood and Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death. Hassett is a member of Team TrowelBlazers, a collective that runs the grassroots and largely community-sourced TrowelBlazer project, which seeks to reset imaginations by presenting the stories of women in the “digging” sciences.
Brenna McCaffrey is a cultural anthropologist who studies the interaction of activism, medicine, and reproduction. She has conducted ethnographic research on abortion in Ireland and is currently researching the history and impact of abortion pills on feminist movements in the United States. She received her Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Follow her on Twitter @anthrofeminist and on TikTok @paigingbrenna.
Brian Anthony Keeling is a doctoral candidate studying paleoanthropology at Binghamton University, State University in New York. His research interests include human paleobiology, evolutionary morphology, and mandibular biomechanics, with a focus on why our own species and the Neanderthals evolved. Keeling is particularly interested in the lower jawbone (mandible) to identify prehistoric human species and make inferences about how behavior, diet, and climate can affect its shape over time.
Brian Ballsun-Stanton is the solutions architect in digital humanities for the Macquarie University Faculty of Arts, with more than seven years’ experience designing and delivering technical solutions for academic and student research projects. He studies the philosophy of data and the trends of far-right extremism within social networks. Ballsun-Stanton is also the technical director for the FAIMS project, which builds electronic field notebooks for offline, geospatially enabled data collection with structured data and multimedia. Follow his newsletter at faims.substack.com.
Brian Fagan was born in England, was educated at the University of Cambridge, and worked in Central Africa before beginning his teaching career at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1967. He is now emeritus. One of the world’s leading archaeological lecturers and writers, Fagan is the author of numerous general books on archaeology. His most recent books are Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind, Beyond the Blue Horizon: How the Earliest Mariners Unlocked the Secrets of the Oceans, and The Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels, all published by Bloomsbury Press in New York.
Brian Howell is a cultural anthropologist who studies religion in Southeast Asia and North America. He received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and is currently a professor of anthropology at Wheaton College in Illinois. He is the author of two monographs, Christianity in the Local Context: Southern Baptists in the Philippines and Short Term Mission: An Ethnography of Christian Travel Narrative and Experience, an article on Billy Graham in American Anthropologist, and numerous chapters and articles on how a Christian standpoint and theology inform ethnographic work and, more generally, anthropology.
Briana Pobiner has been a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program since 2005. Her research centers on the evolution of human diet (with a focus on meat eating) but has included topics as diverse as cannibalism in the Cook Islands and chimpanzee carnivory. In addition to her active field, laboratory, and experimental research programs (mainly in Africa), she leads the Human Origins Program’s education and outreach efforts, and manages its public programs, website content, social media, and exhibition volunteer training. She is also an associate research professor of anthropology at George Washington University. Follow the Human Origins Program on Twitter @HumanOrigins.
Brianna Muir is a master’s student in biological anthropology at the University of Central Florida. As an emerging bioarchaeologist, she is interested in how integrative approaches can be used to address questions of personhood, identity, and agency in the past. In particular, she investigates how these factors may have shaped and influenced a person’s lived experiences. Muir received her B.A. from the Australian National University in 2019 and has undertaken fieldwork and research in the Philippines, Vanuatu, and Australia.
Bridget Alex holds a Ph.D. in anthropology and human evolutionary biology. Her research focuses on understanding the processes by which Homo sapiens dispersed globally as all other human groups went extinct over the past 100,000 years. She is particularly interested in the timing and nature of Neanderthal–modern human interactions, and uses radiocarbon dating to reconstruct the biogeography of these populations. Her field projects are in the Balkans, Northeast Europe, and the Levant.
Britt Halvorson is a cultural anthropologist who studies global Christianity, aid, medical waste, and whiteness in the Midwest U.S. and Madagascar. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is currently an associate professor at Colby College in Maine. She is also the author of Conversionary Sites: Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity From Madagascar to Minnesota.
Brittany Kenyon-Flatt is a biological anthropologist who studies primate evolution, variation, and taxonomy. She received her Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, where her dissertation focused on macaque taxonomy and morphology. Currently, she is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow at North Carolina State University and is working on questions related to hominin postcranial taxonomy. Kenyon-Flatt has published widely for academic and public audiences. Follow her on Twitter @britkenyon01.
Bruce Hardy is a paleoanthropologist and archaeologist specializing in Neanderthals. His research focuses on understanding stone tool use through microscopic residue analysis. He is a professor of anthropology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where he teaches his students Neanderthal skills such as making fire and wooden spears. In 2020, he and his colleagues published evidence of the oldest-known surviving string, circa 50,000 years old, from the Neanderthal site of Abri du Maras in France. He also teaches a course on science and pseudoscience.
C.D. Green is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His research is about understanding the power of the past in political ideologies and community identity formation. In particular, he focuses on how normalizing narratives of the past in museums also normalizes certain political realities and their goals. His dissertation research is on the independence movement and referenda in Kanaky/New Caledonia. His background is in archaeological heritage legal compliance work, especially the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, for museums, universities, and the U.S. military.
Caitlin Schrein earned a doctorate in evolutionary anthropology from Arizona State University. She has conducted fieldwork searching for early primates in North America, monkeys in Europe, apes in Kenya, and the first hominins to leave Africa. Her doctoral research examined the relationship between human evolution education and students’ interest in science and their decision-making about social issues with a scientific basis, such as climate change.
Caleb Everett is an Andrew Carnegie fellow and a professor of anthropology at the University of Miami.
Camilla Di Biase-Dyson is a lecturer in the department of history and archaeology at Macquarie University in Australia. Her research focuses on metaphor in ancient Egyptian, and Egyptian language, ancient medicine, and everyday religion. Di Biase-Dyson’s approaches to ancient data range from linguistics and cognitive science to literary analysis and cultural studies. She focuses on utilizing and expanding the tools of digital corpus analysis for ancient languages. Follow her on Twitter @DiBiaseDyson.
Cara Ocobock is the director of the Human Energetics Laboratory at Notre Dame. Her research program integrates human biology and anthropology, with a focus on the interaction between anatomy, physiology, evolution, and the environment. She explores the physiological and behavioral mechanisms necessary to cope with and adapt to extreme climate and physical activity. Ocobock works in northern Finland in collaboration with researchers from the University of Lapland and University of Oulu. This project focuses on reindeer herders, a highly active cold climate population. Her research assesses their lifeways, life history patterns, and cold climate adaptations, and addresses potential health disparities. This work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @caraocobock.
Caree Banton is an associate professor of African diaspora history and the director of African and African American studies at the University of Arkansas. She completed her Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University in 2013. Her research has been supported by grants such as a Lapidus Center Fellowship at the Schomburg Center and a Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholars Award, and funded by organizations such as Rotary International, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her book, More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of the African Republic explores experiences of freedom, citizenship, nationhood, race, and belonging across the Atlantic world.
Carlos David Londoño Sulkin is a sociocultural anthropologist who contributes to international scholarship on Indigenous Amazonian societies and on morality. He teaches at the University of Regina in Canada and is the president of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America. Londoño Sulkin received his B.A. from the Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, in Colombia, and his Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is the author of People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon.
Caroline Giles Banks is a medical anthropologist who studies the cultural dimensions of eating disorders. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, Banks served on the faculties of the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and Luther College in Deborah, Iowa, among other colleges and universities. Written in several genres—poetic memoir, ekphrastic poetry, and haiku—her poetry is informed by her training and experience as a cultural anthropologist and often explores themes of marginalization, displacement, and loss. Banks is the author of six books of poetry, including The Weight of Whiteness: a Memoir in Poetry and Picture a Poem: Ekphrastic and Other Poems.
Carolyn Wilke is a Chicago-based freelance science journalist and one of the hosts of the podcast Science for the People. After a decade in the lab and earning a Ph.D. in environmental engineering, she now writes about research in areas spanning archaeology to neuroscience. Her work appears in outlets including Science News, Scientific American, Eos, and Knowable. Follow her on Twitter @CarolynMWilke.
Carrie Arnold is a freelance writer living in Virginia. She writes about various aspects of the natural world and has had her work published in Mosaic, Aeon, Nautilus, Environmental Health Perspectives, Scientific American, Discover, New Scientist, and other publications. When she isn’t writing, she enjoys spending time outdoors, knitting, and annoying her cat. Find her on Twitter @edbites.
Caterina Sartori is a visual anthropologist and film curator in London. She is a film officer and film festival director at the Royal Anthropological Institute and a doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on property regimes, value, and citizenship in the London housing market. Follow her on Twitter @cate_etac.
Catherine Draycott is from Bermuda and works as a classical archaeologist at Durham University in the U.K. She specializes in ancient art and the archaeology of Iron Age Anatolia, modern Turkey. Draycott is interested in theories of interpretation, decentering the Greco-Roman focus of classical archaeology to include other contemporary groups, and the demographics of archaeology as a discipline.
Catherine Bolten is a development anthropologist who has worked in Sierra Leone since 2003. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is currently an associate professor of anthropology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. Bolten is the author of I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone. She is currently working on a project investigating the nexus of agriculture, wildlife, and zoonotic disease in rural villages.
Catrine Jarman is a Ph.D. researcher in archaeology and anthropology at the University of Bristol, specializing in bioarchaeology with a particular focus on isotope analysis to study past migration, diet, and resource use. Her research covers both Viking Age Europe and Polynesia, and she currently directs a project investigating the Viking Great Army’s winter camp in Repton, Derbyshire.
Cay Leytham-Powell is an editorial intern at SAPIENS. She holds a B.A. in biology and human-environment relations from Grand View University, and is pursuing an M.A. in media and public engagement from the University of Colorado, Boulder.
Cecilia Padilla-Iglesias is a Ph.D. candidate in evolutionary anthropology at the University of Zürich. Her research aims to reconstruct the past of contemporary hunting and gathering people from different places in Africa to better understand the processes that shaped the enormous genetic and cultural human diversity on the continent today. Her work is interdisciplinary, combining genetic, ecological, and archaeological analyses with ethnographic fieldwork among hunter-gatherer populations in the Republic of Congo. Previously, she worked in the Yucatán Peninsula, studying the drivers of linguistic diversity. She has been funded by several organizations, including the Leakey Foundation and Fundación “la Caixa.”
Celia Emmelhainz is an anthropologist with fieldwork experience in Mongolia and Kazakhstan. She received her M.A. in anthropology from Texas A&M University, and she now works as the anthropology and qualitative research librarian at the University of California, Berkeley. Follow her on Twitter @celiemme.
Ceren Kabukcu is an archaeobotanical scientist with broad interests in Quaternary paleoecology and plant food and wood fuel use by hunter-gatherers and the earliest farmers in Southwest Asia and Europe. She specializes in the analysis of carbonized plant macro-remains, such as wood charcoal, seeds, and tubers, and has published on a variety of topics including the establishment of anthropogenic, managed woodlands in Neolithic Anatolia; the changing nature of pre-agricultural plant food; and woodland exploitation by late Pleistocene and early Holocene hunter-gatherers.
Chad Huddleston is a sociocultural anthropologist who is interested in how individuals and communities prepare for disasters. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. Huddleston is currently an instructor at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and an adjunct assistant professor at Saint Louis University in Missouri. His current research focus is on preppers and their perception of disasters and their own agency. He is also interested in how popular media constructs the “idea” of preppers and how preppers co-construct an image of themselves on platforms such as YouTube.
Chapurukha Kusimba is a distinguished professor of anthropology in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and Environment at the University of South Florida. He holds his degrees from Bryn Mawr (Ph.D.) and Kenyatta University in Nairobi. His specialties include the archaeology of complex societies and the origins of inequality, ancient African chiefdoms and states, urbanism in Africa, Islam in Africa, and the African diaspora in Asia and the Americas. Kusimba directs multiple anthropological research projects in East Africa and Madagascar. His current project, based on the Kenyan coast, is investigating ancient trade networks between East Africa and South, Southeast, and East Asia.
Charlene Mohammed is currently pursuing her M.A. in anthropology at the University of Victoria. While completing her B.A. at McMaster University, Mohammed researched food security and dietary change among immigrants and refugees living in Canada. Her current research explores the intersections of food security, social relations, and emotions among Indonesian domestic workers who live and work in Singapore.
Charles Fruehling Springwood is a professor of cultural anthropology at Illinois Wesleyan University who specializes in sociocultural theory, race and racism, performance, violence, and Indigeneity. He has conducted fieldwork in Japan, Indigenous North America, Mexico, and most recently, New Zealand. The author or editor of four books, Springwood gained recognition for Team Spirits: The Native American Mascot Controversy (co-edited with C. Richard King), named as a 2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. He has recently served on the executive board of the Central States Anthropological Society.
Charles Keil is a musician, cultural anthropologist, and activist who has published a large number of books, including Urban Blues, Tiv Song: The Sociology of Art in a Classless Society, Polka Happiness, Music Grooves (with Steven Feld), and Bright Balkan Morning: Romani Lives and the Power of Music in Greek Macedonia (with Dick Blau, Angeliki Vellou Keil, and Steven Feld). Born to Groove, previously published online, is coming out as a book in 2021, along with Polka Theory: Perspectives on the Will to Party. Keil is a professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His biography can be summed up in books that have prepared him for versifying and improvised musicking in service to our true species—Humo ludens collaborans. His 2020 book Easily Pleased features “dear gretas,” published by 12/8 Publications.
Charles R. Riggs is a professor of anthropology and a curator of archaeological collections at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Riggs earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona in 1999. He is the author of The Architecture of Grasshopper Pueblo and many other publications on Indigenous architecture in the American Southwest. He is an organizer of the annual Pecos Conference, which is sponsored by Southwestern Archaeology Inc. Riggs has directed a number of field projects in the U.S. Southwest, including those associated with Fort Lewis College’s Archaeological Field School. Through these projects, he has trained numerous students in archaeological field methods and ethical practice.
Charlotte Joy is an anthropology lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of The Politics of Heritage Management in Mali: From UNESCO to Djenné. Joy earned a Ph.D. at the University College London and conducted postdoctoral research at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge.
Charlotte Williams is a Ben Franklin, Presidential Endowment, and Sundry Gifts graduate fellow pursuing a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on cultural heritage and the history of archaeology. Her dissertation investigates how American imperial projects ranging from the United Fruit Company to the Panama Canal used archaeology as a way to control Central American territory in the early 20th century. This research seeks to show how both harvests and heritage were extracted using the same labor and infrastructural systems. Williams’ research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Smithsonian Institution. From 2021–2022, she served as a graduate student fellow for the Mellon-funded Just Futures initiative at the University of Pennsylvania.
Chelsea Fisher is an assistant professor of anthropological archaeology at the University of South Carolina. She studies the deep histories of environmental justice conflicts through community-engaged archaeology. Since 2013, she has been conducting research in and with the community of Yaxunah, Yucatán, Mexico. Fisher’s research investigates the historical-ecological dynamics of colonial and modern cattle farming in Yucatán and the history of gold mining in the Carolinas in the U.S. Her research interests also include the entangled histories of global food systems, interactions among Indigenous and colonial ecological knowledges, and the application of archaeological approaches to environmental justice conflicts.
Chelsea H. Meloche is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of archaeology at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, where she is exploring the effects of repatriation. Her research interests also include critical cultural heritage studies and collaborative and decolonizing research strategies in archaeology and biological anthropology.
Chelsey Kivland, a political and urban anthropologist, studies street politics, insecurity, and social performance in contemporary urban Haiti. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and is an assistant professor in the department of anthropology at Dartmouth College. She is the author of the recently published book Street Sovereigns: Young Men and the Makeshift State in Urban Haiti and several articles in edited volumes and journals. Kivland is currently working on a project, funded by the National Science Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, to analyze the resettlement experiences of deportees in Haiti.
Chenyu Wang is an anthropologist who studies elite students and their self-organizing efforts in China and the United States. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and is currently a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Hamilton College. She is working on a project to study the experience of student activism in predominantly White colleges.
Cherry Jackson is a recent graduate of Oxford University, where she earned a B.A. in archaeology and anthropology. For her undergraduate dissertation, she focused on the performance of gender and respectability among pole dancers. She is interested in issues of representation (from the body, gender, and landscapes to death and burial), Indigenous issues, and the power of the written word. Jackson will begin a master’s in material and visual culture at University College London in the fall of 2016. Follow her on Twitter @CherryJackson19.
Cheryl Deutsch is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. A former Uber driver in Los Angeles, she is currently based in Delhi, where her research explores the science and politics of how transportation planners imagine the future of cities. Her blog, www.HowToAnthropology.com, offers tips and tricks of the trade, including practical discussions of grant writing, research methods, getting published, and teaching.
Chiara Natalucci is an interpreter and translator of Russian and English who teaches English in a secondary school in Italy.
Chilton Tippin is a Ph.D. student in cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He focuses on environmental anthropology, with interests in the anthropology of water and development, the social lives of rivers, and the co-production of land, watersheds, space, and place in the borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Follow him on Twitter @ChiltonTippin.
Chip Colwell is an anthropologist and the founding editor-in-chief of SAPIENS. He was the senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science from 2007 to 2020. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University and has received grants and fellowships with the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Rockefeller Foundation, U.S. Fulbright Program, National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation. His research has been highlighted by the BBC, C-SPAN, and The Wall Street Journal, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. He has published 13 books, including Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture, which has received six national awards. Follow him on Twitter @drchipcolwell.
Chloe Ahmann is an environmental anthropologist who studies how people politicize “impure” environments in the long afterlife of American industry. Much of her work is based in Baltimore, Maryland, where she follows industrialism’s enduring traces in toxified landscapes, patchy regulation, quotidian expressions of white supremacy, and particular orientations toward time. She is the author of Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore and an assistant professor of anthropology at Cornell University. Follow her on the social platform X @chloeahmann.
Chris Begley is an archaeologist who works on issues of identity and popular images of societal collapse. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, focusing on the archaeology of the Mosquitia region of Honduras. He is the author of The Next Apocalypse: The Art and Science of Survival (Basic Books, 2021). He currently focuses on underwater archaeology, working and training students in Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia. His active projects center on shipwrecks in El Salvador, where he was a Fulbright scholar. Follow him on Twitter @ctbegley.
Chris Clarkson is a professor of archaeology at the University of Queensland in Australia. His research focuses on understanding past human behavior through the study of stone artifacts. He has research projects in Australia, India, Africa, and France that all seek to further develop an understanding of Paleolithic human behavior, settlement, and subsistence via the study of lithic technology.
Chris Fisher is an archaeologist, professor of anthropology at Colorado State University (CSU), a National Geographic explorer, and the founder of the Earth Archive. He also directs CSU’s Center for Archeology & Remote Sensing. Fisher’s work explores the connection between human societies and environments through a variety of archaeological and earth science methodologies. He has performed fieldwork throughout Latin America, Europe, and North America. Fisher’s articles and book chapters have appeared in numerous publications, including the American Anthropologist and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. His most recent edited volume is The Archaeology of Environmental Change: Socionatural Legacies of Degradation and Resilience (with J. Brett Hill and Gary M. Feinman). He has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and private sources.
Chris Hunt is a professor of cultural paleoecology at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K.
Chris Standish is a postdoctoral fellow of archaeology at the University of Southampton in England.
Chris Urwin conducts archaeological research in partnership with Indigenous communities in Australia and Papua New Guinea. He is a postdoctoral research fellow at Monash University and the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage. Urwin was previously curator for the First Peoples archaeology collection at the Melbourne Museum. His research has been published in the Journal of Social Archaeology, Australian Archaeology, and The Conversation. Urwin investigates contemporary Indigenous understandings of colonial-era collecting practices and how people build places through time and remember that process. He has received research funding from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, and he will soon commence a Smithsonian Institution fellowship to investigate the social histories of Pacific canoe collections. Follow him on Twitter @c_urwin.
Christian Laheij received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is currently a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale, Germany. His research interests include topics of religious change, dispute resolution, inequality, and uncertainty. Laheij has done anthropological research on the impact of Salafi-inspired Islamic reformism in Mozambique, where he is currently studying the emergence of new religious movements in the context of natural resource extraction and the increasing precariousness of the country’s workforce.
Christian Tryon is a Paleolithic archaeologist who studies the archaeology of the origin and dispersal of Homo sapiens. Most of his work focuses on the Mediterranean region and eastern Africa, and he is particularly interested in stone tools, geological approaches to the human past, biogeography, and the use of museums and archives. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut, where he is a professor of anthropology and the department head. Tryon is also a research associate in the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and in the anthropology department at Harvard University. His current field project investigates early human occupation of what is today Sicily, Italy, and his archival research centers around rockshelters in Tanzania and Uganda.
Christina Cheung is a bioarchaeologist specializing in the use of stable isotope analysis to reconstruct past lifeways. She received her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 2015 and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. Cheung’s research interests include reconstructing past subsistence strategies, looking at the impact of climate change on ancient societies, and exploring themes such as social stratification and the construction of power through studying reconstructed diets. Follow her on Twitter @chris_tt_cheung.
Christina Kefala is a Ph.D. candidate under the China-White European Research Council research project at the University of Amsterdam in the department of anthropology. Her research focuses on foreign businesses and entrepreneurs in China and explores whiteness, gender, branding, advertising, and technology. Kefala obtained her master’s degree in sociology from Fudan University in Shanghai, China. She holds a bachelor’s degree in social anthropology from Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens, Greece.
Christine Cave recently completed her Ph.D. in archaeology at the Australian National University in Canberra.
Christine Chalifoux is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Michigan. With funding from the National Science Foundation, she conducted fieldwork in Kampala, Uganda, among migrant laborers working in the capital city to support their families living in their home regions. She is currently writing her dissertation, which explores themes of family and kinship, ethnicity, resentment, and cosmopolitanism.
Christine Finnan is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on education and childhood. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University and is currently a professor at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. She holds a joint appointment in the department of sociology and anthropology, and the department of teacher education. Her research focuses on school cultures and the effect of schools on students’ sense of self. With the support of a Fulbright-Nehru research grant, she recently completed fieldwork in Odisha, India, examining the school culture and effects on students of a residential school for 25,000 tribal children.
Christine Jeske is a cultural anthropologist who studies work-related racism and narratives of the good life. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is currently an associate professor at Wheaton College in Illinois. Jeske is the author of The Laziness Myth: Narratives of Work and the Good Life in South Africa. Her current research focuses on Whiteness in the narratives of hope among White South Africans and in sustainable farming communities in the United States.
Christine Weeber is the copy editor, sub-editor, and poetry editor at SAPIENS. She has an M.A. in cultural anthropology and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from Colorado State University. She has published two poetry chapbooks, In the Understory of Her Being (in English and Spanish) and Sastrugi. Her work also appears in the Wild Roof Journal, the Kyoto Journal, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary American Poetry and Prose, and other publications. Follow her on Mastodon @christineweeber@mastodon.world.
Christopher Aris is a biological anthropologist who studies the variation and microevolution of human dentition. He holds a B.Sc. in biological anthropology and an M.Sc. in human osteology and funerary archaeology, and he is awaiting examination for his Ph.D. in anthropology. Currently, he works as a teaching associate in anatomy and osteology, and university teacher in anatomy at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. Aris’ research interests include dental development and enamel growth variation between historic populations, and the ethics of destructive analysis of human remains. He is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a certified forensic anthropologist. Follow him on Twitter @ChrisJDAris.
Christopher D. Lynn is a biocultural medical anthropologist who studies cultural impacts on health and human cognitive evolution. He received his Ph.D. from the University at Albany, SUNY, and is currently an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama. He is a co-editor of the volume Evolution Education in the American South: Culture, Politics, and Resources In and Around Alabama and is working on a book about dissociation and consciousness. He is currently conducting research on tattooing and immune response among Pacific Islanders, developing an anthropology outreach program for elementary students, and co-hosting the Sausage of Science podcast. Follow him on Twitter @Chris_Ly.
Christopher DeCou trained as a historian at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. Now based in Tel Aviv, Israel, he writes about science, history, and archaeology. Follow him on Twitter @chrisdecou.
Christopher Hernández is an assistant professor in anthropology at Loyola University, Chicago. As an anthropological archaeologist, his research focuses on issues of archaeological ethics, the application of community-based methods, relational philosophy, and understanding social conflict in a long-term perspective. Through the application of aerial laser scanning (lidar), documentary analysis, and traditional excavation methods, he investigates how the process of making war shaped landscapes in Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico. Follow him on Twitter @profclh and his YouTube channel.
Christopher Howard is an anthropologist and award-winning wine writer. Originally from Sonoma, California, he resides in Wellington, New Zealand.
Christopher Kavanagh is a postdoctoral researcher in cognitive anthropology at the University of Oxford, currently based in Japan. His research interests include East Asian religions, ritual behavior, and the bonding effects of shared dysphoria.
Christopher Manoharan is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Connecticut. His research focuses on religion, musical performance, and mystical experience. His publications and conference presentations include works on Sufism, romantic love, morality, and anthropological methodology. Manoharan studied music and history at the State University of New York, New Paltz, and anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. He is currently a graduate researcher affiliated with the Department of Islamic Arts and Music at Istanbul University in Turkey. His field research in Istanbul is supported by a Fulbright scholarship. Follow him on Instagram @chriskulivan.
Christopher Pollard teaches philosophy and sociology at Deakin University and Federation University. He also teaches sociology at University of Melbourne. His research is on 20th Century European philosophy and social theory, with a focus on the role of embodiment.
Christopher R. Moore is an archaeologist and special projects director at the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program at the University of South Carolina. He received an M.A. in anthropology from East Carolina University in 2000 and a Ph.D. in coastal resources management from East Carolina University in 2009. Moore’s research interests include geoarchaeology, luminescence dating, hunter-gatherer archaeology, Late Quaternary climate and human adaptation, GIS, and remote sensing.
Christopher Roos is an environmental archaeologist and a professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University in Texas. For two decades, he has collaborated with Indigenous communities to study multi-century histories of Indigenous fire management in the U.S. Southwest, the Great Plains of North America, Fiji, and Northern Australia. His primary areas of interest and expertise are in human pyrogeography and behavioral geoarchaeology.
Christopher Webb is a cultural anthropologist who studies the relationship between North American military/warrior culture and medical epistemologies of violence, trauma, and healing. He is a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at Duke University and is the author of articles in Ethnos and Critical Military Studies. Webb is currently working on a project, funded by the National Science Foundation, that investigates the experience of veterans who pursue healing from war in American Indian purification rituals.
Cindy Hsin-yee Huang (she/her) is a Paleolithic archaeologist with a focus on stone tools and cultural evolution. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, and affiliated with the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. Her dissertation, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, studies the emergence and dispersal of microliths, or small stone tools, across Eurasia during the late Pleistocene. This research attempts to understand large-scale patterns of innovation and cultural diffusion during the ancient past and how those impacted, facilitated, and reflected human evolution, migration, and social interactions. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, at @CHYHuang.
Cirilo Vivanco is a Peruvian archaeologist who received his degree from the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Peru, where he currently teaches. He investigates the ancient human occupation of the Peruvian central highlands, with a focus on the pre-Inca and Inca occupations.
Claudia Geib is a science journalist and editor based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her work focuses on marine science, the environment, and wildlife. Her writing has appeared in outlets such as Wired magazine, Hakai Magazine, Mongabay, and Undark, among others.
Claudio Sopranzetti is an associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Central European University. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Oxford University. He is a co-author of The King of Bangkok and the author of Owners of the Map, the winner of the 2019 Margaret Mead Award. Follow him on Twitter @anthroaddict.
Corinna Howland is a Ph.D. candidate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral work explores quinoa producer cooperatives, local economies, and capitalism in the southern Peruvian Andes. Her other research interests include political violence, consumption, and the middle class. She has a background in educational outreach and is a contributor to This Anthro Life Podcast (@thisanthrolife).
Cory-Alice André-Johnson is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies knowledge production in Southwest Madagascar. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in African studies at Tulane University. Her current project engages with colonial afterlives, truth, refusal, and the unknown.
Craig Childs is the author of Apocalyptic Planet. He has been a regular commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Men’s Journal, Outside, The Sun, and Orion Magazine. Awards he has received include the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, the Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure, the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, and, for his body of work, the 2003 Spirit of the West Award.
Craig M. Lee is a scientist at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, an instructor at Montana State University, and a principal investigator at Metcalf Archaeological Consultants. His research interests include the human ecology and landscape archaeology of alpine and high-latitude environments. Lee frequently collaborates with Native Americans to develop culturally respectful methods for ice patch archaeology, and he delights in sharing his results with Native American communities, the general public, and other professionals. He lives in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife and daughter, and their much-loved dog. For more information about his research, see the Ice Patch Archaeology and Paleoecology Project.
Cristina Rocha is a professor of anthropology and the director of the Religion and Society Research Cluster at Western Sydney University in Australia. She is the former president of the Australian Association for the Study of Religion (2018–2019), and she co-edits the Journal of Global Buddhism and the Religion in the Americas series. Rocha’s research focuses on the intersections of globalization, migration, and religion. Her books include Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements: Arguments From the Margins (with Mark Hutchinson and Kathleen Openshaw); John of God: The Globalization of Brazilian Faith Healing, one of the winners of the 2019 Clifford Geertz Prize; The Diaspora of Brazilian Religions (with Manuel Vásquez); Buddhism in Australia (with Michelle Barker); and Zen in Brazil: The Quest for Cosmopolitan Modernity. Follow her on Twitter at @crocha2.
Cyler Conrad is an anthropologist and archaeologist who studies human-animal and human-environmental relationships in mainland Southeast Asia, California, New Mexico, and the Galapagos. He received his Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico (UNM) and is currently an adjunct assistant professor of archaeology at UNM. Conrad is the author of several articles, book chapters, opinion essays, and blogs that focus on aspects of animals, subsistence, and environments in the archaeological record. He has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, and the project of Empowering Network for International Thai Studies, among others. Follow him on Twitter @cylerconrad.
Damian Evans is a research fellow with the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) who specializes in using geospatial and computational methods to explore and understand landscapes across monsoon Asia, from the deep past to the present. An anthropological archaeologist by training, his work lies at the intersection of the geosciences, data science, tropical ecology, and landscape history. Evans was the founding director of the University of Sydney’s overseas research center at Angkor, in Cambodia, before joining the EFEO in 2015. Since then, he has been leading an interdisciplinary team that pursues questions of social complexity, urbanism, cultural exchange, and technological innovation in Southeast Asia from a geospatial laboratory at the EFEO. Evans has active field projects and collaborations in numerous countries in South and Southeast Asia, funded primarily by the European Research Council.
Dana J. Graef is an environmental anthropologist who studies environmentalism and globalization in Latin America. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is currently a visiting scholar in anthropology at Brown University. She has taught courses on the anthropology of climate change and what it means to be “green.” Graef has published essays and articles on topics such as mining, wildness, and cultural diversity. Follow her on Twitter @danagraef.
Dána-Ain Davis is a professor of urban studies and anthropology, and the director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Davis’ work covers two broad domains: Black feminist ethnography and the dynamics of race and racism. She is the author or co-editor of five books; her most recent book is the award-winning Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth, which examines how Black women experience racism in medical encounters during preconception, conception, pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum. Davis also trained at Ancient Song Doula Services and currently supports birthing people as a doula. Follow her on Twitter @drdanaaindavis.
Daniel Ginsberg is the director of education and professional practice at the American Anthropological Association (AAA). They conduct research on anthropologists’ careers in academic, business, government, and nonprofit settings, as well as anthropology education at the graduate, undergraduate, and pre-university levels. Ginsberg also manages education and outreach activities, including Anthropology Day, the AAA’s webinar series, and the public education initiative World on the Move: 250,000 Years of Human Migration. Trained as a linguistic anthropologist of education, Ginsberg’s other interests include experiential and critical pedagogy, such as undergraduate research opportunities, nonformal education, and un-grading.
Daniel Green is an evolutionary biologist and geochemist studying climate change and human and primate origins in Africa. As a Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Climate School postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, Green is contributing to reconstructions of seasonal environments in East Africa over the last the 30 million years that shaped the evolution of African fauna, including African great apes and human ancestors. Green’s research relies upon stable light isotope geochemistry, trace metal analyses, microscopy, and physiological modeling.
Daniel Hruschka is an anthropology professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. He studies culture change and the relationship between culture and behavior. Hruschka’s two main research questions focus on how we stay healthy in diverse social environments and how humans cooperate. For the last 10 years, he has been conducting research on these questions in rural Bangladesh.
Daniel Meza is a Peruvian science journalist and editor-in-chief and founder at N+1 (nmas1.lat), a popular science and technology magazine for Latin America and Spain. He founded the Peruvian Association of Science Journalists and Communicators (APCiencia) and also was a 2019 professional fellow at the International Center for Journalists, U.S.
Danilyn Rutherford is the president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, which funds SAPIENS. Previously, she was an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and, more recently, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Raiding the Land of the Foreigners, Laughing at Leviathan, and Living in the Stone Age.
Danny Pinedo is a cultural anthropologist who studies the relationship between state formation and Indigenous people in the Peruvian Amazonia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida and is currently an associate professor and the head of the anthropology department at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru. He is the author of several articles and book chapters on community-based conservation, Indigenous mobilization, territory, and ethnicity.
Darcie DeAngelo is an anthropologist who studies postwar ecologies in Cambodia. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University in New York. She is working on her book Beloved Technologies: On Bombs and Rats in a Cambodian Minefield as part of the University of California Press’s Atelier workshop series. DeAngelo also produces short ethnographic film and experimental ethnographic exhibits.
David A. Westbrook is the Louis A. Del Cotto professor at the University at Buffalo School of Law, State University of New York. His books include Navigators of the Contemporary: Why Ethnography Matters and Deploying Ourselves: Islamist Violence and the Responsible Projection of U.S. Force.
David Berliner is a professor of anthropology at Université Libre de Bruxelles. His research interests include social memory and cultural transmission. He lives in Brussels.
David Bowman is a professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania and is an honorary professor of archaeology and natural history at the Australian National University. He explores the relationship between fire, landscapes, and humans. Bowman’s research is focused on the ecology, evolution, biogeography, and management of fire. He co-authored the textbook Fire on Earth: An Introduction.
David E. Shi sacrificed simplicity to serve as president of South Carolina’s Furman University from 1994 to 2010. He is an American intellectual historian who has published two books about simplicity in the American experience: The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture and In Search of the Simple Life: American Voices, Past and Present. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1976. Shi is also a co-author (with George Brown Tindall) of the best-selling book America: A Narrative History, now in its 10th edition, and is at work on a cultural history of loneliness.
David Flood is a cultural anthropologist who studies race, capitalism, and activism in the U.S. His current project is a critical exploration of Whiteness and class in the rural U.S. South based on ethnographic work in amateur music scenes where leftist activists and White working-class communities interact. Flood’s work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and published in Ethos and Anthropology News. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where he is a postdoctoral fellow, and he currently serves as co-editor-in-chief of the Journal for the Anthropology of North America.
David Graeber was a professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. He authored Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, and was a contributor to Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, and The Baffler. An iconic thinker and renowned activist, his early efforts in Zuccotti Park helped make Occupy Wall Street an era-defining movement. He died on September 2, 2020.
David K. Wright is a professor of anthropology at the University of Oslo in Norway. His research interests primarily revolve around understanding interactions between humans and the environments they inhabit. Over the last several years, he has pursued archaeological research in three primary geographic regions: the U.S. Southwest and in different parts of Africa. Wright’s objective is to understand where sediments originate from and where they end up being deposited within a chronometric framework (source-to-sink analysis). This informs archaeological site preservation/taphonomy and understandings of human behavior and adaptations to landscape change.
David Leins is a video journalist, filmmaker, and aspiring anthropologist. He is currently a web producer at American Ethnologist and plans to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology focusing on youth media production and the dynamics of grassroots activist networks in Palestine and Detroit, Michigan. Leins’ pieces have appeared in such publications as the Middle East Eye, Cultural Anthropology’s AnthroPod: The SCA Podcast, and The Arab American News. To learn more about his work, visit CultureRealm. Follow him on Twitter @davidleins.
David Lewis-Williams is an emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His research has primarily concerned San peoples’ rock art. He has also published books on the Upper Paleolithic cave art of Western Europe and the megalithic tombs of the Near East and Europe. Lewis-Williams founded the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Cape Town. He is an elected member of the Royal Society of South Africa and a past president of the South African Archaeological Society. In 2015, he was awarded the South African Order of the Baobab (Gold Class) for his contributions to archaeology. His most recent book is Image-Makers: The Social Context of a Hunter-Gatherer Ritual.
David Witelson is a doctoral candidate in archaeology at the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. His thesis concentrates on the rock art in and around the Stormberg and uses performance theory to investigate the practice of image-making. His other research interests include the late Holocene archaeology of Southern Africa’s Later Stone Age. Witelson is currently conducting research on the archaeology and rock art in the eastern foothills of the Maloti-Drakensberg mountains with archaeologist Paloma de la Peña at the Evolutionary Studies Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge University. He has also published research about Southern African stone tools
David Nkusi is a heritage management and heritage studies expert. He received his master’s degree in heritage management from the University of Kent and Athens University of Economics and Business, and is a heritage sites protection specialist at Rwanda Cultural Heritage Academy. Nkusi is working on a project supported by Linnaeus University in Sweden to study the relationship between heritage, communities, and the decolonization process in Rwanda, with a particular focus on Nyanza District. Follow him on Twitter @daudinkusi.
David Pearce is an associate professor of archaeology at the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand. His primary research interest is in cognitive archaeology, and he specializes in Southern African hunter-gatherers. Pearce mostly works with Later Stone Age rock art and related archaeology in South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province Drakensberg mountains. His other major interest is in the chronology and direct dating of rock paintings.
David Reich is a professor of genetics and of human evolutionary biology at Harvard University. His work focuses on studying population mixture, with application to both medicine and human history. In medical genetics, he has developed and applied methods to use the history of mixture of populations in the history of African Americans to find genetic risk factors that contribute to health disparities. His methods have also led to the discovery of ancient population mixtures in South Asians, Europeans, and remote Oceanians as well as interbreeding between archaic and modern humans. In 2013, Reich built the first state-of-the-art laboratory in the U.S. for studying genome-wide ancient DNA, and much of his work focuses on using the power of ancient DNA to gain new insights into medical and evolutionary genetics. His book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past summarizes the state of this field.
David Wengrow is a professor of comparative archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London and has been a visiting professor at New York University. He is the author of several books, including What Makes Civilization? Wengrow conducts archaeological fieldwork in various parts of Africa and the Middle East. Follow him on Twitter @davidwengrow.
Dawn Starin, an anthropologist, received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has spent decades doing research on primates—human and nonhuman. Her articles have appeared in publications as varied as Al Jazeera, Behaviour, Critical Asian Studies, The Ecologist, Gastronomica, The Humanist, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Natural History, The New York Times, Philosophy Now, and Scientific American, among others.
Dean Falk is an evolutionary anthropologist who studies the brain, cognition, and culture. She is a distinguished research professor and the Hale G. Smith professor of anthropology at Florida State University. Falk is also a senior scholar at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has written about wide-ranging topics that include the origins of language and music, Albert Einstein’s brain, and the discoveries of pathbreaking early hominins, such as Australopithecus africanus and Homo floresiensis (“hobbit”). Her most recent book, Geeks, Genes, and the Evolution of Asperger Syndrome (2018), is co-authored with her granddaughter Eve Penelope Schofield.
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Modern Blackness, Exceptional Violence, and Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, and a co-editor of the volume Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness (with Kamari Maxine Clarke). Thomas also co-produced and co-directed the experimental documentary Four Days in May, co-curated the Bearing Witness Exhibit and co-directed the documentary Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens. Prior to her life as an academic, she was a professional dancer with the New York–based Urban Bush Women.
Deepa Padmanaban is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore, India. Her work has been published in BBC Earth, National Geographic, The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The Cut, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter @deepa_padma.
Deidre H. Crumbley is a sociocultural anthropologist and emerita professor of Africana studies at North Carolina State University. Her books, Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: Gendered Experiences in African Instituted Churches Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, and Saved and Sanctified: The Rise of a Storefront Church in Great Migration Philadelphia, are examples of her fascination with how people negotiate inequalities while building community. Crumbley is delving into these dynamics closer to home in her current writing project. In it, she relates incidents from her mother’s life in Jim/Jane Crow America, experienced north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, during the Great Migration of 6 million Black Americans between the 1910s and 1970s.
Delande Justinvil is a third-year doctoral student at American University whose interests lie at the intersections of biocultural anthropology, cultural history, race and science, critical geography, and Black studies. His research brings together biological, archaeological, and archival methods to interrogate the afterlives of slavery, with a particular focus on the 19th- and 20th-century mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. Delande has participated in excavations in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S. In 2019, he was the lead curator of Plans to Prosper You: Reflections of Black Resistance and Resilience in Montgomery County’s Potomac River Valley, presented by the American University Museum.
Delmar Ulises Méndez-Gómez is an essayist, documentary filmmaker, and Tseltal academic from Chiapas, México. He is a doctoral student in anthropological sciences at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Unidad Iztapalapa. His field of study is affective anthropology, Native peoples, and communication. Méndez-Gómez is the author of the bilingual book of essays El giro de la Pelota. Te sututet ixtabil. He is conducting a study on the semantics of emotions and sexuality in young Tseltals in Chiapas. Follow him on Twitter @S0fes and Instagram @Delmar_penka.
Demetrio Gómez Ávila is a leading Rroma human rights activist who has worked for more than three decades advocating for social justice and Rromani rights through decolonial and intersectional perspectives. During his activist career, he became a founding member of the Forum of European Roma Young People, the first international Romani youth organization in Europe, and president of Ververipen: Rroma for Diversity, a pioneering Spanish Rromani LGBTQ+ organization. He has served as an expert and trainer for the Council of Europe, the European Commission, and other organizations connected to racial justice, anti-fascism, and the fight against xenophobia and discrimination.
Denise Su is an associate professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a research scientist in the Institute of Human Origins. Her research explores the environments in which our early ancestors lived to provide insight into how environmental factors shaped the trajectory of human evolution. She previously was the curator of paleobotany and paleoecology and the chief academic engagement officer at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, integrating research with public outreach and education, and leading initiatives to increase access to and diversify participation in science.
Dennis Sandgathe is a paleoanthropologist and Paleolithic archaeologist who studies Neanderthal adaptations. He is particularly interested in the development of fire use and the evidence for intentional burial among Neanderthals. He received his Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia and is currently a lecturer in the department of archaeology at SFU. He is also a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. He is the lead author of “Timing of the Appearance of Habitual Fire Use” and “The Roc de Marsal Neandertal Child: A Reassessment of Its Status as a Deliberate Burial.”
The authors would like to acknowledge the other members of their research team: a third Paleolithic archaeologist, Shannon McPherron (at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany) and two geoarchaeologists: Paul Goldberg (a professor emeritus at Boston University) and Vera Aldeias (a researcher at Max Planck Institute).
Devin Proctor is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in digital anthropology, studying identity and group construction in online spaces. He earned his Ph.D. from George Washington University and works as an assistant professor of anthropology at Elon University. Proctor is currently working on projects that address the process of radicalization into online white power extremism and those that trace misinformation and memorialization during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Di Hu is an archaeologist whose work focuses on the Andes. In 2016, she received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a book titled Social Landscapes of Rebellion in the Late Colonial Andes, 1760–1840. Another of her projects is the analysis and experimental re-creation and use of Tiwanaku projectile points to shed light on state formation among the Tiwanaku, who lived in parts of present-day Bolivia, southern Peru, and northern Chile around 400–1000. She is also working to understand the social landscape of Vilcashuamán province just before it was conquered by the Incas, and she is attempting to figure out Native Andean migration patterns by analyzing colonial censuses. She is an avid flint knapper. Follow her on Twitter @dihuarchaeology.
Diana Crow is a freelance science writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. Follow her on Twitter at @CatalyticRxn.
Diana Kwon is a freelance science journalist based in Berlin, Germany, with a master’s in neuroscience from McGill University in Canada. She covers the life sciences, health, and academic life through news stories, features, and profiles. Her work has appeared in publications such as Scientific American, The Scientist, Nature, and Quanta Magazine. Follow her on Twitter @DianaMKwon.
Diana Marre is a social anthropologist who studies assisted conception and reproductive technologies, parenthood, and childhood in Spain. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona. Marre is currently an associate professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the director of the AFIN Research Group and Outreach Centre. She co-edited, with Laura Briggs, International Adoption: Global Inequalities and the Circulation of Children. She is currently working on a project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, studying reproductive politics, rights, and desires in Spain. Follow her on Twitter @DianaMarre and Facebook @Diana Marre.
Diego Garate is an archaeologist who studies the world’s earliest cave art. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Cantabria in Spain, where he is currently working as a researcher. Garate is the author of several books and papers about the symbolism of artwork made by the first modern humans in Europe, and he leads various survey projects in Spain and France. He has discovered 10 unknown decorated caves. Follow him on Twitter @GarateDiego.
Dimitris Xygalatas is an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, where he directs the Experimental Anthropology Lab. He has previously held positions at Princeton University, Aarhus University in Denmark, and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, where he served as the director of the Laboratory for the Experimental Research of Religion. His research focuses on some of the things that make us human, such as ritual, sports, music, and group membership, which he studies through a combination of ethnographic and experimental methods. Xygalatas has conducted several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Europe and Mauritius. He is the author of Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living and over 100 articles published in journals and volumes across several disciplines. Follow him on Twitter @xygalatas, Facebook @xygalatas, and Instagram @xygalatas.
Dina Rivera is a bioarchaeologist whose work focuses on the ethical responsibility of scientific engagement in virtual spaces, as well as the healing closure offered by human remains repatriation. She received her master’s degree from the University of South Florida and is currently the administrative and communications coordinator of the Register of Professional Archaeologists. Rivera is currently collaborating with a global set of professional archaeologists to decolonize and diversify archaeology. Follow her on Twitter @dangergrrlie.
Djuke Veldhuis is an anthropologist and science writer based at Monash University in Australia, where she is a course director in the B.Sc. advanced–global challenges degree program. Her Ph.D. research examined the effects of rapid socioeconomic change on the health and well-being of people in Papua New Guinea. Veldhuis is passionate about science communication, public engagement with science, and citizen science initiatives. She has written for a series of popular science outlets, including SciDev.Net, Asia Research News, and New Scientist. Follow her on Twitter @DjukeVeldhuis.
Dolly Stolze is a forensic-science writer and researcher. Her work has been featured in Forensic Magazine, the blogs Defrosting Cold Cases and Death & the Maiden, and the travel-destination website Atlas Obscura. She is also the editor of Strange Remains. Follow her on Twitter @StrangeRemains.
Dona Davis is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in medical, psychological, and biocultural anthropology and maritime studies. She is currently a professor emeritus at the University of South Dakota. Davis has conducted research in Newfoundland, Canada; the Norwegian Arctic; and the United States. Her latest books are Twins Talk: What Twins Tell Us About Person, Self, and Society and The Meaning of Horses: Biosocial Encounters (co-edited with Anita Maurstad).
Donald C. Wood is a cultural anthropologist and an associate professor in the medical school of Akita University, Akita City, Japan, where he has been based since completing a doctoral degree in cultural anthropology at the University of Tokyo in 2004. He has been researching social conditions in northeastern Japan since 1995. He is the author of Ogata-Mura: Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village and was a contributor to the volume Japan’s Shrinking Regions in the 21st Century: Contemporary Responses to Depopulation and Socioeconomic Decline. Wood is also the editor of Research in Economic Anthropology, a member of the editorial board of the Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology, and a frequent contributor to the Kyoto Journal (2011, 2014, 2018).
Douglas Fox is a freelance journalist who writes about the earth, the Antarctic, and polar sciences—with an occasional foray into neuroscience. His stories have appeared in Scientific American, National Geographic, and other publications. Fox is a contributing author to The Science Writers’ Handbook: Everything You Need to Know to Pitch, Publish, and Prosper in the Digital Age.
Douglas K. Smit is an anthropological archaeologist who studies the historical relationships between local communities, colonial states, and globalization. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2018. Smit is currently a senior fellow in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches classes on archaeology, economic anthropology, and popular culture. He co-directs Proyecto de Investigación Histórico Arqueológico-Santa Bárbara, a joint Peruvian-North American research program that examines the mercury mines of Santa Barbára, Peru. Using archaeology, archival research, and oral histories, this project investigates the everyday lives of past miners and works with the contemporary descendent community to illuminate how the mine’s legacy continues into the 21st century. When not teaching anthropology, Smit is most likely playing with his two rescue dogs, Charlie Darwin and Nuna. Follow him on Twitter @AnthroArch.
Duke Peltier recently served five consecutive terms as the elected Ogimaa (Chief) of Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory. He provides his guidance and expertise on several boards, including the Robinson Huron Treaty Trust. In 2019, he was appointed the Children’s Commissioner of the Anishinabek Nation, a role he continues to fulfill.
Duncan Sayer is a reader in archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire. He directed excavations at Oakington early Anglo-Saxon cemetery and Ribchester Roman Fort, and has worked extensively in field archaeology. Sayer is the author of Ethics and Burial Archaeology.
Durba Chattaraj is an anthropologist who teaches writing and a writer who teaches anthropology at the Princeton Writing Program. Previously, she acted as one of the first faculty to co-found a new liberal arts university in India, Ashoka University, where she taught anthropology and writing. She is working on a book titled Democracy, Education, Decolonization that examines the relationship between pedagogy and democracy in both the U.S. and India. Follow her on Substack: The Difference Filter.
Durrie Bouscaren is a radio journalist, covering migration and social change in Turkey and the Middle East. She regularly contributes to National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and various podcasts. Follow her on Twitter @durrieB.
Dyna Rochmyaningsih is a freelance science journalist based in North Sumatra whose works have appeared in Nature, Science, and BBC Future. She received a National Geographic Society grant to support her coverage of the Orang Rimba.
Eben Kirksey is an associate professor of anthropology at the Alfred Deakin Institute in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of three books: Freedom in Entangled Worlds, Emergent Ecologies, and The Mutant Project. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Atlantic, and Wired. Follow him on Twitter @eben_kirksey. (Author photo courtesy of Kyle Depew.)
Edda Guareschi is an adjunct lecturer in forensic science at the College of Science, Health, Engineering, and Education at Murdoch University. She is a medical doctor and specialist forensic pathologist. Guareschi has earned an M.Sc. in forensic anthropology and odontology and is a Ph.D. candidate. She conducts research for Murdoch University at the Western Australia Shipwrecks Museum, studying bones that have been submerged at sea for centuries.
Eduardo García is an activist and photojournalist from Mexico City. His work has focused primarily on the struggles of Indigenous peoples in Mexico, Central American migration, forced disappearance, and social movements. He now forms part of the Michigan Solidarity Network, the Militarization in the Americas Research Collective, and the School of the Americas Watch. García studied political science, but he has learned more from Central American migrants demanding their rights to safe transit and from families looking for their disappeared loved ones. As a researcher and photographer, he is currently involved with the Undocumented Migration Project. Follow him on Twitter @garo87.
Edward F. Fischer is a professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University, where he also directs the Institute for Coffee Studies. He has authored and edited several books, including Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third Wave Tastemakers Create Value and The Good Life: Aspiration, Dignity, and the Anthropology of Wellbeing. Follow him on Twitter @effischer.
Elaine Guevara is a biological anthropologist who studies the evolution of life history and aging in primates. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University and is a lecturer at Duke University. She has worked at Bezà Mahafaly Special Reserve in southwest Madagascar and at the Duke Lemur Center studying sifaka lemurs. Guevara’s research focuses on the molecular changes in the brain in aging.
Eleanor Scerri is an archaeological scientist interested in exploring the articulation between genetics, biogeography, and material culture phylogeny to further theoretical, methodological, and scientific advances in the field of human evolution. She is the head of the Pan-African Evolution Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany. Scerri’s research combines primary fieldwork in the Arabian Peninsula and West and North Africa with experimental and quantitative approaches integrated with diverse sources of information, such as genetic and palaeoclimatic, in order to test competing hypotheses about human evolution. Follow her on Twitter @DrEleanorScerri.
Elham Shabahat is a researcher and writer interested in conservation, cities, forests, and the climate crisis. She studied environmental anthropology and sciences at the Yale School of the Environment. Follow her on Twitter @eshirin.
Elic Weitzel is a human ecologist and archaeologist who studies sustainable natural resource use and management in the past and present. He is a postdoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and M.S. from the University of Utah. Follow him on Instagram @elicweitzel and on the social platform X @ElicWeitzel.
Elisa (E.J.) Sobo is a medical anthropologist and the chair of anthropology at San Diego State University. Her research focuses on alternative approaches to health and illness, and what they tell us about the world in which we live. Her most recent projects concern vaccination choice, cannabis use for children with intractable epilepsy, conspiratorial thinking, and the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Past president of the Society for Medical Anthropology, Sobo has published numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and has authored, co-authored, and co-edited 12 books—including second editions of Dynamics of Human Biocultural Diversity: A Unified Approach and The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine. Her work has been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other news outlets.
Elise Andaya is a cultural anthropologist who studies gender and reproductive politics in the U.S. and Cuba. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2007 and is an associate professor at the State University of New York, Albany. She is the author of Conceiving Cuba: Reproduction, Women, and the State in the Post-Soviet Era, as well as a number of articles and book chapters on gender and reproductive health care.
Elisheva L. Cohen is a postdoctoral fellow in international issues and sustainable development at Indiana University. She is a researcher and practitioner of refugee education, international and global education, and international development.
Elizabeth A. DiGangi is an assistant professor of anthropology at the State University of New York, Binghamton.
Elizabeth Grace Veatch is a zooarchaeologist who studies the diet of ancient humans from Island Southeast Asia. She received her Ph.D. from Emory University in 2021 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Most of her research centers on abundant rat remains from Liang Bua in Indonesia to understand how humans incorporated smaller animals into their diet. Follow her on Twitter @egveatch.
Elizabeth Keating is a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. Her research interests include societal impacts of technology, visual and multimodal communication, virtual work groups, cross-cultural communication, language and hierarchy, knowledge transfer in families, and anthropological methods in cross-disciplinary research. She holds a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Keating is the author of Words Matter: Communicating Effectively in the New Global Office and Power Sharing: Language, Rank, Gender, and Social Space in Pohnpei, Micronesia.
Elizabeth Obregón is a Ph.D. candidate in the anthropology department at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her dissertation research explores race-making through the lens of family genealogies and considers how genetic ancestry tests are (re)shaping narratives of race and ancestry. Her work has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies. She is a University of Illinois Chicago–Inter-University Program for Latino Research Mellon fellow.
Elizabeth Preston is a freelance science journalist whose writing appears in publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Science. She also contributes to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and other humor outlets. Preston lives in the Boston area with her family. Follow her on Twitter @inkfish.
Elizabeth Sawchuk is a bioarchaeologist and anthropological archaeologist who studies the biological and social impacts of the spread of food production across sub-Saharan Africa. She conducts research in Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia to understand the different ways in which people adopted herding and farming, and the environmental and cultural contexts of these transitions. Sawchuk’s work combines diverse evidence from human remains, ancient DNA, mortuary contexts, material culture, and ethnographic records to understand how people cope with periods of major change and what lessons we can learn from the past. She is currently a Banting postdoctoral fellow and an adjunct professor at the University of Alberta in Canada. She is also affiliated with Stony Brook University in New York, the Turkana Basin Institute in Kenya, and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (MPI-SHH) in Germany.
Elizabeth Svoboda is the author of What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness, and she has contributed to Aeon, Discover magazine, Psychology Today, and The New York Times. She lives in San Jose, California, with her husband and two young sons. Follow her on Twitter @svobodster.
Elizabeth Weigler is a Ph.D. candidate and graduate researcher in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). For her B.A., she double majored in anthropology and history at Ripon College. She also holds an M.A. in cultural anthropology from UCSB. Her dissertation fieldwork focuses on the public heritage projects of Sikhs living in the United Kingdom. She has published with community-based endeavors, including Sikh Foundation International in 2012, and she has two forthcoming articles in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Sikhism. Follow her on Twitter @ea_weigler.
Ellie Lobovits is a filmmaker, anthropologist, and cultural observer. Her research, writing, and filmmaking focus on borderlands, the body, and feminist narratives. She holds an M.A. in visual anthropology from San Francisco State University, and her writing has appeared in The Establishment and American Anthropologist. Lobovits’ recently released documentary film Birth on the Border explores women’s stories of border crossing, border harassment, and childbirth in El Paso–Ciudad Juárez. Follow her on Facebook @birthontheborderfilm.
Elvia Andía Grageda is a linguist specializing in the study and instruction of Bolivian Quechua and Spanish. She holds a master’s degree. Andía Grageda’s research investigates the role of Quechua in the linguistic policies of Indigenous languages in higher education, particularly in the Quechua Public Indigenous University in Bolivia. Andía Grageda joined Ohio State University in 2016 and coordinates the Quechua program for both undergraduate and graduate students across six institutions. She is the world’s first certified oral proficiency interview tester for Quechua and has published on teaching methods and Indigenous stories. In 2019, she won the Premio Guamán Poma de Ayala in Indigenous Language, a national literature prize in Bolivia, for her novel Pirqakunawan parlaspa – Hablando con las paredes, which is in Quechua and Spanish.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega is a science journalist based in Mexico. He is a bilingual reporter covering research and science policy, with a particular focus on Latin America. He has worked for a variety of media outlets, including The Associated Press, Scientific American, and the news sections of Science and Nature.
Emily K. Brunson is a cultural anthropologist who studies health care access and decision-making in the United States. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington and is currently an associate professor at Texas State University. She has published in American Anthropologist, Cultural Anthropology, Pediatrics, and Vaccine. Brunson co-leads CommuniVax, a rapid research and action coalition, funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Institute, in support of an equitable COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
Emily Hammer is an anthropological archaeologist of the Middle East and South Caucasia. She is currently an assistant professor of archaeology and digital humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research investigates the territorial organization of ancient polities, the development of early cities, and long-term changes in the interactions between culture and environment. Hammer uses geographic information science (GIS and spatial analysis), archaeology, satellite imagery analysis, and archival research as tools for recovering human experiences that have otherwise been sidelined in narratives about the past. In particular, she works to uncover the experiences of mobile pastoralists and other communities that lived in agriculturally marginal environments, such as deserts and highlands. Hammer has conducted archaeological surveys and excavations in Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, and Iraq with funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and other sources.
Emily Laber-Warren writes about health, psychology, and the environment for The New York Times, Newsweek, Scientific American, and other publications, and is a contributing editor at Spectrum. She is the director of health and science reporting at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, and the author of A Walk in the Woods: Into the Field Guide, an introduction to forest ecology for young children. She lives in New Jersey. Follow her on Twitter @elaberwarren.
Emily Mendenhall is a medical anthropologist and professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She has published widely at the boundaries of anthropology, psychology, medicine, and public health, and serves as a co–editor-in-chief of Social Science and Medicine—Mental Health. Her monographs include Syndemic Suffering, Rethinking Diabetes, and Unmasked. Follow her on Twitter @mendenhall_em.
Emily Sekine is the cultural and linguistics development editor for SAPIENS. She has a Ph.D. in anthropology from The New School for Social Research. Prior to joining the team at SAPIENS, she worked with academic authors to craft journal articles and book manuscripts as the founder of Bird’s-Eye View Scholarly Editing. Her anthropological research and writing explore the relationships between people and nature, especially in the context of the seismic and volcanic landscapes of Japan. Emily’s work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Society of Environmental Journalists, among others, and her essays have appeared in publications such as Orion magazine, the Anthropocene Curriculum, and Anthropology News.
Emily Yates-Doerr is an anthropologist who studies public health nutrition in the U.S. and Guatemala. She received her Ph.D. from New York University. She is currently an associate professor at Oregon State University, where she teaches in the Food in Culture and Social Justice program, and a faculty member of the University of Amsterdam. She is the principal investigator on a multisited European Research Council–funded project documenting maternal health interventions. Yates-Doerr is the author of The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala and is currently working on her second book, Doing Good Science: When Fetal Development Is Global Development in Guatemala and Beyond. Follow her on Twitter at @eyatesd.
Emlyn Dodd is an archaeologist investigating ancient wine and oil production across the Mediterranean. He is the assistant director of archaeology at the British School at Rome and has worked at sites such as Pompeii in Italy and the Acropolis and Classical Agora in Athens. Dodd currently directs excavation and survey projects in Italy and Greece, including the Roman city of Falerii Novi. He is also a specialist consultant at the Roman site of Antiochia ad Cragum in southern Turkey, with the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. In addition, he works closely with the Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion at the University of Technology Sydney.
Emma Cieslik is a religious scholar, museum worker, and public historian based in the Washington, D.C., area. She has conducted extensive research among Catholic, Jewish, and religious LGBTQIA+ communities. Her writing, which focuses on religious culture in the U.S., material religion, and embodiment, has been published in Archer Magazine, Religion & Politics, The Revealer, Nursing Clio, Feminist Studies in Religion, Killing the Buddha, Teen Vogue, and more. Cieslik has also worked in a variety of museums across the D.C. area focused on the collections management and curation of objects with sacred, spiritual, and religious power.
Emma Elliott Smith is a historical ecologist and interdisciplinary scientist who studies food webs in the past and present. She received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico (UNM) and recently completed a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Elliott Smith is now a postdoctoral researcher and adjunct assistant professor at both San Diego State University and UNM. She is studying the changing ecology and food web dynamics of fish populations along the Pacific Coast of North America through geochemical analyses of specimens from zooarchaeological and historical contexts.
Emma Louise Backe is a medical anthropologist who works on gender-based violence, trauma, and reproductive health issues. She received her M.A. from George Washington University and currently works as a subcontractor with the United States Agency for International Development. She is the managing editor of The Geek Anthropologist and an active member of the D.C. resistance, working to combat street harassment and improve the care provided to survivors of sexual violence. She has been published by Peeps magazine, The New Inquiry, and Anthropology News. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaLouiseBacke.
Emma Marris writes about nature, people, food, and culture from Klamath Falls, Oregon. Her stories have appeared in Discover, Nature, and The New York Times, among other publications, and she is the author of Rambunctious Garden. Find her on Twitter @Emma_Marris.
Eric Guiry is a postdoctoral fellow at the Trent Environmental Archaeology Laboratory at Trent University in Canada. He is an archaeological scientist specializing in using chemical analyses to explore past cultural and biological phenomena. Guiry’s research explores questions about how humans interacted with their environments in the past.
Eric Jackson is an organizer, educator, author, and filmmaker. He serves as the visionary and a co-founder of Black Yield Institute, an organization committed to building a movement toward Black land and food sovereignty in Baltimore, Maryland. He and his team are committed to building a cooperatively owned grocery store in South Baltimore, while also conducting Black-led research, facilitating political education, and organizing an action network. A Baltimore native from the Cherry Hill Community, Jackson is the recipient of numerous awards and a public speaker who has presented hundreds of addresses and workshops to diverse groups about food sovereignty, building power, and establishing strong organizations to address complex social issues, specific to people of African descent.
Eric Montgomery is an assistant professor of anthropology at Michigan State University and a faculty member in peace and conflict studies at Wayne State University. He is a co-author of the book An Ethnography of a Vodu Shrine in Southern Togo: Of Spirit, Slave, and Sea (with Christian Vannier) and an editor and a contributor to Shackled Sentiments: Slaves, Spirits, and Memories in the African Diaspora. Some of his publications can be found in the journal Shaman, The Applied Anthropologist, the Journal of Religion and Society, the Journal of Africana Religions, Visual Anthropology, American Ethnologist, and the Journal of Ritual Studies.
Eric Simons is an anthropological archaeologist and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of British Columbia, primarily focused on the interplay between archaeology and contemporary peoples. His doctoral research examines how archaeology can contribute to Canada’s truth and reconciliation process, particularly through applied, community-driven archaeological investigation in Indian Residential School mortuary contexts.
Erica Weiss is an anthropologist who studies coexistence, pluralism, and liberalism and its discontents. She received her Ph.D. at Princeton University and is currently an associate professor at Tel Aviv University. She is currently the principal investigator of a European Research Council–funded project called Praxis of Coexistence: A Comparative and Inductive Approach to the Challenges of Diversity. Follow the project on the social platform X @PraxisofCoexist.
Erik Vance is a science writer and author based in Baltimore, Maryland. He writes about psychology and the environment—and does the odd archaeology story. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, National Geographic, and Scientific American.
Erin L. Thompson is a professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. She holds a Ph.D. in ancient art history and a J.D., both from Columbia University, and is the author of the book Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors From Antiquity to the Present. Currently, she is curating an exhibit of artwork made by detainees at Guantánamo Bay. Follow her on Twitter @artcrimeprof.
Erin Routon is a Ph.D. candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Cornell University. Her current research focuses on legal advocacy in migrant “family” detention facilities in the U.S., primarily in South Texas. Through her work, she is interested in addressing questions of care and the management of the complex relationship between the state, for-profit carceral entities, and humanitarian legal advocacy within the current climate of immigrant detention. A native Texan, she presently lives in Ithaca, New York, while she completes her dissertation.
Erina Baci is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the University of Michigan. She received her M.A. from Mississippi State University and her B.A. from the University of Toronto. Her dissertation research consists of settlement pattern analyses to explore questions of settlement, movement, and mobility in human communities from the end of the Bronze Age to the end of the Iron Age in present-day Western Kosova and Northern Albania. Baci is currently the geodatabase manager for RAPID-Kosova, an archaeological survey project based in Western Kosova. She shares her writing and other resources on the blog The Albanian Archaeologist.
Erle C. Ellis is a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he also directs the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology. His research investigates the ecology of human landscapes from local to global scales with the aim of informing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere. Ellis recently published the book titled Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction.
Ernest Weston Jr. is a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the Porcupine district. He’s traveled the world studying regenerative food systems development and sociology as a student at both South Dakota State University and Oglala Lakota College. Weston has put his skills to use on the reservation and now serves as the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s economic development strategist. He is a well-known community member who is highly involved in grassroots volunteering and outreach projects.
Eshe Lewis holds a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Florida. She has worked extensively with Afro-descendants in Peru on women’s rights, gender violence, social movements, Black feminism, and identity politics. Lewis was the public anthropology fellow at SAPIENS magazine from 2020 to 2022 and is currently the project director for the SAPIENS public scholars training fellowship program.
Esteban M. Gómez has done archaeological research on pre-Columbian and historic sites in Mexico and Central America. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently the curator of digital anthropology at the University of Denver. His research is concerned with colonial encounters in the Americas, postcolonial narratives, cultural representation, and rituals of citizenship performed at museums and heritage sites. Gómez is currently working on a creative arts research project about Denver high school students’ views of the social, economic, and demographic changes happening in their city. Follow him on Instagram @curation.days and on Twitter @CurationDays.
Esteban Salmón is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Stanford University studying the criminal justice system in Mexico. He carried out two years of ethnographic fieldwork in prosecutors’ offices and neighborhoods in Mexico City to understand how democratic pressures for crime control affect the everyday work of prosecutors and the lives of incarcerated communities. Follow him on Twitter @EsteSalmon.
Esther Landhuis is a biologist-turned-journalist who freelances in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her stories have appeared in NPR, Scientific American, Nature, Undark, Science News for Students, and other publications. She enjoys writing profiles and stories about surprise and hope. Follow her on Twitter @elandhuis.
Fay Johnston is a public health physician and epidemiologist who heads the interdisciplinary Environmental Health Research Group at the Menzies Institute for Medical Research to address environmental determinants of health, including the epidemiology of air pollution from outdoor fires and domestic wood heaters, aero-allergens, and heatwaves. She also holds a concurrent appointment as a specialist medical adviser for population health services in the Tasmanian Department of Health. Johnston also led an expert team from the United States, Canada, and Australia to produce the only existing global mortality burden estimate for landscape fire smoke, which placed the health impacts of tropical deforestation fires on the global agenda. She was named among 145 international women leaders in fire science by the Fire journal in 2018 and the 2019 air quality champion by the Clean Air Society of Australia and New Zealand.
Faye Harwell is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Boston University, where she studies the life history patterns of great apes. For her dissertation research, she is investigating the growth and development of orangutans during their long juvenile period. In particular, she is examining hormonal changes that lead to somatic growth and sexual maturation. Her past research looked at the jumping performance of frogs under different moisture and temperature conditions. Harwell received both her B.A. and M.S. degrees in biology from Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Felix Padel is an anthropologist trained at the University of Oxford and the University of Delhi. He has authored many articles and three major books: Sacrificing People: Invasions of a Tribal Landscape, Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel (with Samarendra Das), and Ecology, Economy: Quest for a Socially Informed Connection (with Ajay Dandekar and Jeemol Unni). Padel has been a professor of rural management at the Indian Institute of Health Management Research and has lectured and taught at Jawaharlal Nehru University and many other institutions in India and elsewhere.
Ffion Reynolds is an honorary research fellow at Cardiff University who specializes in ancient Britain and Ireland. In 2011, she joined Cadw, the historic environment service for the Welsh government, to work as a community archaeologist in the south Wales area. Reynolds oversees the public programs for Cadw across 130 sites in Wales. She also co-directs a public archaeology project in the multi-period landscape around the important site of the Bryn Celli Ddu Neolithic passage tomb on the island of Anglesey.
Fiona Murphy is an anthropologist based in Queen’s University Belfast. As an anthropologist of displacement, she works with Stolen Generations in Australia and people seeking asylum and refuge in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Turkey.
Fiona Stewart is a lecturer in wildlife conservation at Liverpool John Moores University in England. She earned her Ph.D. in biological anthropology from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her current research uses genetics to improve a chimpanzee survey across the Greater Mahale Ecosystem of western Tanzania. In collaboration with Alexander Piel, The Nature Conservancy, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, and the Jane Goodall Institute, she is working to prioritize key areas for conservation using technology, genetic census, and investigation of gene flow. She and her collaborators also provide information and assistance to local and regional governments to coordinate village land use plans with conservation strategies.
Flint Dibble is an archaeologist whose research focuses on foodways in ancient Greece and urbanism, climate change, religious ritual, and everyday life. He is a Marie-Skłodowska Curie research fellow in the School of History of Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University. His project ZOOCRETE: The Zooarchaeology of Historical Crete: A Multiscalar Approach to Animals in Ancient Greece combines archaeological, textual, and biomolecular evidence for the human management and consumption of animals. Follow him on the social platform X @FlintDibble and on YouTube.
Frances Jenner is a journalist based in Medellín, Colombia. She writes about Indigenous languages, politics, and minority rights for Latin America Reports, and has contributed to The Bogotá Post and The Next Web. Follow her on Twitter @Fjenner91.
Frances Sutton is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Ohio State University, where she earlier earned her M.A. She received her B.A. in anthropology from Kenyon College. Her research focus is sports and culture in the United States, with a particular interest in the relationship between gender and sports consumption. Her dissertation research focuses on the intersection of sports and social identity among Arab American women in the U.S.
Francine Russo is a journalist based in New York City. She has written for The Atlantic, TIME, Parade, and Scientific American. She is the author of Love After 50: How to Find It, Enjoy It, and Keep It. (Author photo credit Jane Hoffer.)
Franco Viviani is a retired anthropologist teaching at the University of Padua, Italy. He has studied many different topics, mainly related to the evolution of the body, and conducted field research across Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Malta, Guinea-Bissau, and South Africa. He served as the president of the International Society for Physical Activity and Health for 14 years. Viviani is currently interested in the impacts of globalization.
Fred Nyongesa Ikanda is a lecturer in and the chair of the sociology and anthropology department at Maseno University in Kenya. He received his doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge and has published extensively on refugee and migration issues. His current research focuses on kinship, religion, and gender relations in the Dadaab refugee camps. Follow him on Twitter @Wnyongesa.
Gabby Omoni Hartemann (they/them) is Afro Guianese, Omo Òrìs̩à in the Ilê Axé Iyaba Omi community (Brazil), and a transgender Ph.D. student in anthropology and archaeology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). Their approach to archaeology is defined by African and Afrodiasporic ontologies and the anti-colonial commitment to invoke the many silenced stories of their homeland Guiana, a contemporary French colony situated in the Amazon. Their dissertation project deals with past and present relations between the land and Afro Amazonian communities in the Guianas. They are currently a co-director of “Archéo La Caroline: Lavi Nou Gangan,” an ethnographic and archaeological project based in Guiana that centers on a 19th-century site of African enslavement and its relationship with Indigenous and Afrodiasporic communities.
Gabriel D. Wrobel is an associate professor of anthropology at Michigan State University and the director of the Central Belize Archaeological Survey Project. He researches mortuary and biological variability in ancient Maya individuals interred in caves and rockshelters in central Belize.
Gabriel Maralngurra is a co-manager and founding member of Injalak Arts, a cooperative of Indigenous artists from the Aboriginal community of Gunbalanya in northern Australia. A painter and printmaker, his work features a breadth of subject matter—from ancestral narratives, plants, and animals to imagery of early colonial encounters. In January 2020, he undertook a residency at the University of Virginia to coincide with the launch of The Inside World: Contemporary Aboriginal Memorial Poles at The Fralin Museum of Art. His work is held in the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, the National Museum of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria, and the British Museum.
Gabriella Soto is an anthropological archaeologist who studies how migrants, border agents, humanitarian activists, artists, land managers, and other stakeholders interact within the landscape of migration and contemporary security along the Mexico border in the U.S. Southwest. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 2018, and after completing a postdoctoral fellowship at Trinity College, she joined the faculty at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College as a visiting fellow.
Gary Urton is the Dumbarton Oaks professor of pre-Columbian studies in the department of anthropology at Harvard University. His latest book is Inka History in Knots: Reading Khipus as Primary Sources.
George “Choch” Kenny is an Elder, Knowledge Keeper, and Band member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Lac Seul Ojibwe). He has a lifetime of knowledge of Lac Seul First Nation’s topography, protocols, and local language. He is currently completing a master’s thesis in cultural anthropology at Lakehead University in Canada. A former journalist and editor of Wawatay News, Kenny is also a translator for Oji-Cree and Anishinaabe First Nations. He is the author of Indians Don’t Cry (Gaawiin Mawisiiwag Anishinaabeg) and a co-author of the play October Stranger, which was dramatized in 1985. Kenny, his son Mike Auksi, Alicia Colson, and other members of the Teaching Circle are working on a project partially funded by an Engaged Research Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation on Animism: An Insider’s View.
George Gmelch is a professor of anthropology at the University of San Francisco and at Union College. He is the author of a dozen books, including the memoir Playing With Tigers: A Minor League Chronicle of the Sixties. He played minor league baseball in the Detroit Tigers organization in the 1960s, and in 1997, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Minor League Baseball Association for his writings on baseball.
George M. Leader is an archaeologist who studies hominid and early human behavior through the analysis of stone-tool manufacturing and usage. His research in South Africa focuses on how early hominins produced stone tools and the subsequent transmission of cultural knowledge from 2 million years ago until 300,000 years ago. He received his Ph.D. from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at The College of New Jersey.
George Nicholas is a professor of archaeology at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in British Columbia, Canada. He was the founding director of SFU’s Indigenous Archaeology Program in Kamloops (1991–2005). Nicholas has worked closely with the Secwepemc and other First Nations in British Columbia, and Indigenous groups worldwide. Since 2003, he has also been an adjunct faculty member of the archaeology department at Flinders University in South Australia.
Georgiana Murariu is a public engagement officer in anthropology at University College London. She is currently working on the Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing project. Murariu has worked as a qualitative researcher in different sectors ranging from commercial market research to user research for local government. She has a master’s in social anthropology from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Gideon Lasco teaches anthropology at the University of the Philippines. His research interests include contemporary height crises, drug issues, human stature, and human-water relations. He obtained an M.D. and an M.Sc. from the University of the Philippines, and a Ph.D. in medical anthropology from the University of Amsterdam; he also holds an M.A. in the history of science from Harvard University. His first book, The Philippines is Not a Small Country, won the Philippine National Book Award and was cited in The Guardian as one of the “books that explain the world.” Follow him on the social platform X @gideonlasco.
Gillian Tett serves the Financial Times as the editorial board chair and editor-at-large in the U.S. She writes weekly columns, covering a range of economic, financial, political, and social issues. Before joining the Financial Times in 1993, Tett was awarded a Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge University based on fieldwork in the former Soviet Union. She is the author of The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers, which looks at the global economy and financial system through the lens of cultural anthropology. She also authored Fool’s Gold: How Unrestrained Greed Corrupted a Dream, Shattered Global Markets, and Unleashed a Catastrophe, a 2009 New York Times bestseller and Financial Book of the Year at the inaugural Spear’s Book Awards. Her next book, Anthro-Vision: A New Way to See in Business and Life came out in June 2021. Follow her on Twitter @gilliantett.
Glenn H. Shepard Jr. is an ethnobotanist, filmmaker, and museum curator at the Goeldi Museum in Brazil. He has worked with diverse Indigenous peoples of Latin America, particularly in Amazonia. Shepard’s research interests include ethnobiology, medical anthropology, visual anthropology, and the territorial rights of isolated peoples. He has participated in the production of several films and has collaborated with Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History in curating an online virtual reality exhibit on Kayapó Indigenous filmmakers in Brazil. He has also published literary nonfiction and reviews in The Common, The Millions, Broad Street, Popula, and The New York Review of Books. He has won several writing awards, including a prize for anthropological fiction from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and the W.H.R. Rivers Graduate Prize. In 2020, his poem “The Fish Trap” was featured by SAPIENS for World Poetry Day. He blogs at Notes From the Ethnoground. Follow him on Twitter @TweetTropiques and Instagram @ethnoground_photography.
Gloria Dickie is a freelance environmental journalist. Her work has appeared in National Geographic News, High Country News, onEarth, Discover, Outside, Adventure Journal, and Motherboard. Reporting trips have taken her across North America and beyond. She’s covered wildfires in Arizona; grizzly bear and black bear management in Alberta and Montana; the 2015 U.N. Climate Summit in Paris, France; and energy issues north of the Arctic Circle, in Tromsø, Norway. She has a master’s degree in environmental journalism from the University of Colorado.
Gordon Barclay is an archaeologist who spent 30 years as the principal inspector and latterly head of policy at the government heritage agency Historic Scotland. He is active in challenging “fake history” presented by both English and Scottish nationalists, and has written extensively on the misuse of the past for political ends.
Gordon Mathews teaches anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has written about topics as varied as the Japanese generation gap, Hong Kong identity, what makes life worth living, and cross-cultural meanings of happiness. His most recent research has focused on low-end globalization, leading to the books Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong; Globalization From Below: The World’s Other Economy, for which he was an editor; and The World in Guangzhou: Africans and Other Foreigners in China’s Global Marketplace (forthcoming).
Grace Neveu is a linguist who studies sign languages. Her research has centered on Peru, both in the Indigenous communities of the Amazon and the urban populations of Iquitos. Her particular focus is on emerging sign languages and how community makeup affects the process of language development. Neveu’s research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Graham Pruss earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Washington. His research focuses on vehicle residency, homelessness, critical narratives, public policy, and outreach to marginalized people in the United States. Pruss currently contracts as a liaison for the unhoused community for the city of Seattle, serves on the mayor of Seattle’s Innovation Advisory Council, and has led the documentation of regional vehicle residency for the annual point-in-time count of homeless and unhoused people since 2017.
Greg Beckett is an assistant professor of anthropology at Western University in Canada. He specializes in the study of crisis, disaster, and trauma from the standpoint of moral experience. His work focuses on how people make sense of exceptional events and on the ethical and political relationships that emerge in and around responses to crisis. His geographic area of expertise is the Caribbean, specifically Haiti, where he has worked for about 15 years. His most recent publication is There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Follow him on Twitter @GregBeckett9.
Gregory Forth obtained his doctorate from Oxford University and is professor emeritus in anthropology at the University of Alberta and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia over a period of nearly 50 years and is the author of 10 books and more than 100 scholarly papers. His interests include religion, ritual, oral narrative, ethnobiology, and systems of classification.
Greta Uehling is a teaching professor at the University of Michigan who studies war and migration. Her major projects have examined the experiences of refugees, asylum-seekers, and the internally displaced. She has published two books, Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine and Beyond Memory, and co-edited two volumes. She has also authored numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. Uehling earned her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow with Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.
Gwynfryn Thomas is an anthropologist working in the nonprofit sector in London. He is also a columnist, with Djuke Veldhuis, for SAPIENS. His poems have appeared in Haque, Pomegranate, SAPIENS, and Vocal Solo. Follow him on Twitter @matthewgthomas.
Haidamteu Zeme Newme is a doctoral student in humanities and social sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. Her research areas include translation studies, comparative literature, archival processes, and Indigenous cultures and their language systems. Her article “Writing Every-Day in Translation: Thoughts on Genre, Language, and the ‘Translated Naga’” published in the South Asian Review and short pieces on Indian artforms appear on the Memeraki blog. She also writes about her translation journey between Zeme and English. Her forthcoming publication, due out from Zubaan, focuses on migration and women.
Hal Phillips is an ethnographic filmmaker. He and his partner, Meg Kinney, founded Bad Babysitter, a business ethnography firm based in New Orleans, Louisiana. Combining principles of the social sciences, documentary filmmaking, and business acumen, Bad Babysitter helps businesses and organizations grow by becoming more empathetic to the people they serve. He earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Emory University and has since molded himself into a researcher, videographer, editor, and digital storyteller whose media are video and photography.
Hannah Borenstein is a Collegiate assistant professor in the Social Sciences Collegiate Division and Harper-Schmidt fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. Her research and writing is broadly concerned with intersections of sports, race, gender, politics, and labor, with a particular focus on long-distance running in Ethiopia. Her book project, provisionally titled Running to Labor: Ethiopian Women Distance Runners in Networks of Capital, comes from over two years of fieldwork in Ethiopia, along with multisited archival and anthropological research in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Borenstein received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Duke University, with certificates in African and African American studies, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies.
Hannah Hoag is an award-winning science journalist who covers people, the planet, and the ways they interact. She is a former managing editor of Arctic Deeply and has written for The Atlantic, Discover, Nature, and other publications. Follow her on Twitter @hannahh.
Hannah Odoom is a multi-genre writer who explores poetry and academic writing and their intersections. In 2021, she received her B.A. in anthropology from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her writing explores themes of language, identity, belonging, and what it means to carve out diasporic identity. Odoom is also interested in investigating the exchange and intersection of African diasporic language in musical forms by exploring the use of pidgin, patois, and U.K. slang within music genres.
Hannah Seo is a freelance science journalist, podcast writer, and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. She has covered everything from neuroscience to Indigenous harvest rights, coral cell cultures, and the power of small talk. Their work can be found in WIRED, Scientific American, The Walrus, and Popular Science, among other publications.
Harold L. Dibble is a Paleolithic archaeologist specializing in Neanderthal behavior. He has directed excavations at a number of sites in France, Egypt, and Morocco, and he is the director of the Laboratory for the Study of Ancient Technology, which focuses on experiments in stone tool production. He is currently a professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and curator-in-charge of the European Archaeology Section at the Penn Museum.
The authors would like to acknowledge the other members of their research team: a third Paleolithic archaeologist, Shannon McPherron (at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany) and two geoarchaeologists: Paul Goldberg (a professor emeritus at Boston University) and Vera Aldeias (a researcher at the Max Planck Institute).
Heath Cabot is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies refugees, human rights, and access to health care in Greece. In 2010, she received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she is now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece. Her current project, which has been funded by the Fulbright Program, is on austerity, community-based health care, and solidarity movements in Greece. She is also co–editor-in-chief of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review. Follow her on Twitter @heathcabot.
Helena Miton is a cognitive anthropologist and complexity postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute. She investigates how culture is maintained through time and what determines the shapes traditions take. She holds her Ph.D. in cognitive science from Central European University and previously was a member of the Minds & Traditions research group at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. Follow her on Twitter @HelenaMiton.
Hilda Lloréns is a cultural anthropologist whose research investigates the workings of race, gender, power, and resistance across sociocultural contexts. Geographically, her focus is on the Hispanic Caribbean, mainly Puerto Rico, and U.S. Latinas. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Rhode Island. Lloréns is the author of Imaging the Great Puerto Rican Family: Framing Nation, Race, and Gender During the American Century and a co-author of Arrancando Mitos de Raíz: Guía Para una Enseñanza Antirracista de la Herencia Africana en Puerto Rico (Pulling Myths Up From the Roots: A Guide to an Antiracist Teaching of the African Heritage in Puerto Rico). Currently, she is conducting ethnographic research on environmental injustice, racism, and women’s activism in Puerto Rico. Follow her on Twitter @HildaLlorens.
Hipólito Sanchiz Alcaraz graduated in journalism and humanities from CEU-San Pablo University in Madrid. His research focused on historical battles in the history of Spain. He is an adjunct professor in the Spanish department at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York.
Hipólito Sanchiz Álvarez de Toledo is an adjunct professor of ancient history at the Faculty of Humanities and has a C.C. in communication from the CEU-San Pablo University in Madrid, where he teaches prehistory, the ancient history of the Near East, and archaeology. He also coordinates and teaches the digital archaeology module at the CEU School of Architecture. His main research lies in the ancient Middle East, especially Mesopotamia, and his second line of research has to do with contemporary Spanish history. He co-published A History of Spanish Secret Societies (with León Arsenal) and various articles in Aportes and Revista de Órdenes Militares on military orders in the 19th and 20th centuries. Álvarez de Toledo has also participated with the CEU-San Pablo (Madrid) and UTPL (Loja, Ecuador) universities in the project to apply new technologies in prehistory at the Quillusara site in Ecuador. He is a member of the editorial board of the F.U.E. Historical Research Cuadernos magazine and secretary of the Military Orders Magazine of the Spanish Órdenes Foundation.
Holly Dunsworth is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Rhode Island, where she teaches courses on human origins, evolution, and variation. She performs paleontological work at the Early Miocene sites on Rusinga Island, Kenya, where some of the most ancient fossil apes are preserved. She also studies living primates, particularly when it comes to their energy use, reproduction, and life history. Follow her on Twitter @HollyDunsworth.
Holly Walters is a cultural anthropologist and lecturer in anthropology at Wellesley College. She received her Ph.D. from Brandeis University and is a current member of the MeTooAnthro Collective. Her ethnographic work focuses on Shaligram (sacred ammonite) practice in Nepal, in India, and among the global South Asian diaspora. She is the author of Shaligram Pilgrimage in the Nepal Himalayas and a book on Shaligram interpretive practice due out in 2023. She also has multiple article publications on ritual and divine personhood in South Asia, discussing topics such as the language of fossil folklores, deity darshan, and robot ritual performance. Follow her on Twitter @Manigarm.
Huarui “Cherry” Zhang is a senior at Hamilton College double majoring in anthropology and economics. She is writing her senior thesis on college students’ pursuit of “collegiate fun” and the formation of neoliberal subjecthood.
Hugh Gusterson is a professor of anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. With a Ph.D. from Stanford University, he writes about nuclear culture, drone warfare, counterinsurgency, international security, and ethics. His books include Drone: Remote Control Warfare, People of the Bomb: Portraits of America’s Nuclear Complex, and Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War. Gusterson’s essays have appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, Science, Nature, and New Scientist. He recently was awarded the Anthropology in Media Award by the American Anthropological Association. Follow him on Twitter @GustersonP.
Husik Ghulyan is a visiting scholar at the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies with a Ph.D. in urban and environmental studies. His dissertation examined the production of urban space in Turkey. His current research studies the political geographies of modern and Soviet Armenia.
Ian Gilligan is an honorary associate in the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney in Australia. His interdisciplinary research examines the origins of clothing and psychological and philosophical implications of wearing clothes. He graduated in medicine (M.B., B.S.) and prehistoric archaeology (M.Phil.) at the University of Sydney, and earned his Ph.D. in paleoanthropology at the Australian National University. Gilligan is the author of the books Another Tasmanian Paradox: Clothing and Thermal Adaptations in Aboriginal Australia and Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory: Linking Evidence, Causes, and Effects. The latter received the 2020 PROSE Award for best book in archaeology and ancient history.
Ian Kuijt is a professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, who specializes in the social geography of village life within small-scale ancient and historical communities. Drawing on ethnography, social theory, and archaeology, his scholarship focuses on emerging social inequality, identity, and the construction of community through ritual and economic means. Kuijt is the author or co-editor of seven books, including Transformation by Fire: The Archaeology of Cremation in Cultural Context and People of the Middle Fraser Canyon: An Archaeological History. His co-authored book Island Places, Island Times uses photographic-recognition software to play 23 linked 2-minute films that he designed, filmed, and produced with William Donaruma. Kuijt has written numerous articles in scholarly publications, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Anthropology, American Antiquity, Economic Anthropology, and the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Ian Lindsay is an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University in Indiana. He has been studying the history and prehistory of the South Caucasus since 2000, and his research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright Program, and Purdue University, among other organizations. He most recently led an archaeological settlement survey of Armenia’s upper Kasakh River Valley as part of Project ArAGATS, a long-standing international archaeological collaboration between Armenian and American scholars. His archaeological practice incorporates the use of GIS and terrestrial and aerial remote-sensing techniques.
Ina Goel works with hijras, a “third” gender community in India, and is the founder of The Hijra Project. She has a B.A. in journalism and an M.A. in social work from the University of Delhi in India. She completed her M.Phil. in social medicine and community health from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Goel has worked with All India Radio and Al Jazeera English. She was a recipient of a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship at the department of epidemiology and international public health at Bielefeld University and an INLAKS scholar at the department of gender and sexuality studies at University College London. Goel has also worked with FHI 360 (a nonprofit human development organization), UNICEF, the National AIDS Control Organization in India, the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, and the humanitarian organization Plan International. She is currently a Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme awardee based in the anthropology department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Ioana Iancu has a master’s in cultural anthropology and development from the University of Bucharest. Her work as a research assistant for U.S. and Dutch anthropologists doing fieldwork in Romania focused on tuberculosis, childbirth, housing, and urban marginality. She has also volunteered for many cultural projects and film festivals. Follow her on Twitter @IoanaIancu.
Ira Bashkow teaches cultural anthropology at the University of Virginia. His award-winning book The Meaning of Whitemen: Race and Modernity in the Orokaiva Cultural World explores the entanglement of ideas of race with development and modernity in Papua New Guinea. His essays on the history of anthropology have been published in American Anthropologist, Histories of Anthropology Annual, History of Anthropology Newsletter, and TLS: The Times Literary Supplement. Bashkow is currently writing a book tentatively titled The Corporate Form: History, Culture, Capital.
Irma McClaurin is an award-winning author, poet, and “born again” anthropologist. She is the founder of the Irma McClaurin Black Feminist Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. SAPIENS Public Anthropology Fellow Eshe Lewis published an in-depth conversation with McClaurin about the archive at “Preserving Black Women’s Stories as a Labor of Love.” McClaurin holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in anthropology and an MFA in English. She has published more than 90 articles and three books of poetry. She is the author of Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America and the editor of Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics, which was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine in 2001. McClaurin is a member of the National Writers Union and the Triangle Association of Freelancers, and she sits on the Ms. Magazine committee of scholars. She has a forthcoming collection called JustSpeak: Essays on Race, Culture, and Politics in America. Follow her on Twitter as the culture and education editor @insightnews.
Isabella Alexander-Nathani is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, educator, and cultural anthropologist focused on human rights. She is the founder and executive director of Small World Films, a nonprofit production studio that uses grounded social science research and social impact storytelling to lift the voices of marginalized populations to the global stage and to fight for international policy change. Follow her on Twitter @isabella_writes and Instagram @smallworldfilms.
Ishaan Patil completed a master’s of science in environmental anthropology from the University of Kent. He now works as a research assistant at the James Hutton Institute in Scotland. His research interests include environmental conservation, education, migration, food, and social inequality. Patil tries to make his research more accessible through drawing and art. Follow him on Twitter @ish2an and on Instagram @ishaanpatil.
István Darabán is a Transylvanian-born freelance writer covering topics in science, philosophy, anthropology, and archaeology. He has a B.Sc. in biomedical science from King’s College London and is currently completing his M.Sc. in neuroscience and science communication at the University of Amsterdam.
Iván Sandoval-Cervantes is an assistant professor in anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He was a research fellow at the Animal Law and Policy Program at Harvard Law School in 2022. He received his B.A. in anthropology from the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla, an M.Sc. in the philosophy of social science from the London School of Economics, and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Oregon. His work on internal and transnational migration from Mexico to the United States has appeared in academic journals and in his recent book, Oaxaca in Motion: An Ethnography of Internal, Transnational, and Return Migration. For his research project on animal rights in Mexico, Sandoval-Cervantes has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork in his hometown of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, since 2017.
Ivo Ngade is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Gender and Africa Studies at the University of the Free State in South Africa and a visiting professor of anthropology and ethnography in Africa at Ghent University in Belgium. In 2014, he received his Ph.D. from the department of African languages and cultures at Ghent University. Ngade’s research focuses on behavioral changes during disease outbreaks, especially emerging infectious diseases (including Ebola and COVID-19), cultural changes due to technology use, and transnational migration. Follow him on Twitter @ivongade.
Jacob Dunn is a senior lecturer in zoology at Anglia Ruskin University in the U.K. From 2012 to 2016, he was a lecturer in the division of biological anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Jacob Pagano is a journalist based in Los Angeles, California. Follow him on Twitter @jacobapagano.
Jacqueline Knirnschild currently lives and works on a permaculture farm in western Massachusetts. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Mississippi, and her writing has been published in Ninth Letter, Product Magazine, Full Stop, Number: Inc, The Key Reporter, Burnaway, and the Cleveland Review of Books.
Jacqueline Matthews is a consultant archaeologist and postgraduate student at the University of Western Australia. Her research interests include Australian Indigenous archaeology, modern human origins, and theoretical approaches in archaeology. Together with Martin Porr, she is currently working on a project titled Decolonising Human Origins. Follow her on Twitter @archaeo_jacq.
Jacqui Mulville is an archaeologist with over 35 years of experience in professional, field, and academic archaeology. She is a professor of bioarchaeology and the head of archaeology and conservation at Cardiff University. Mulville specializes in archaeological science (particularly zooarchaeology and bioarchaeology), the archaeology of islands and coasts, heritage management and archaeological practice, and contemporary and historical archaeology.
James Suzman is an anthropologist and the head of the Cambridge-based research and support group Anthropos. His latest book is Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen. Follow him on Twitter @anthrotwittering.
Jamie E. Shenton is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in questions of gender and sociocultural change among Indigenous Kichwa peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. She received her Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and is currently an associate professor of anthropology at Centre College in Kentucky. Shenton also teaches in gender studies, social justice studies, and Latin American studies. Her most recent work on the Kichwa can be found in the edited volume From Filmmaker Warriors to Flash Drive Shamans: Indigenous Media Production and Engagement in Latin America. Her research at present focuses on the politics of representation in contemporary feminism.
Jamie Hodgkins is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Denver. She is a co-director for excavations at the Arma Veirana site in northwestern Italy. Her research is focused on reconstructing modern human and Neanderthal behaviors by uncovering their hunting and butchering patterns and analyzing the mobility of their prey species through isotopic analysis. Hodgkins’ other research projects include excavations in France, Spain, Bulgaria, Morocco, and South Africa.
Jan Simek is a faculty member in the department of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research interests include Paleolithic archaeology, human evolution, quantitative analysis, spatial analysis, archaeology of the Southeastern United States, and cave archaeology. He has been involved in the exploration of numerous “unnamed caves,” a naming practice used to protect their location, in the Cumberland Plateau. Simek has been instrumental in the investigation of ancient artwork dating back thousands of years. He has also conducted research in France at Neanderthal habitation sites.
Jane Palmer is a science journalist based in Eldorado Springs, Colorado. She covers public health, medicine, natural hazards, and climate change. Follow her on Twitter @JanePalmerComms.
Janine R. Wedel is an anthropologist and professor in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the global policy chair at the University of Bath in the U.K. and a fellow at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. She is the author of Unaccountable: How the Establishment Corrupted our Finances, Freedom, and Politics and Created an Outsider Class, now out in paperback and as an e-book. Her other books include the award-winning Shadow Elite, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, and The Private Poland. A public intellectual, Wedel has contributed to more than a dozen major media outlets and appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Al-Jazeera, BBC, and NPR. She is a co-founder and the former president of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy. Follow her on Twitter @janinewedel.
Janric van Rookhuijzen is a classical archaeologist and postdoctoral research fellow at Utrecht University. His research (part of a Veni grant by the Dutch Research Council, 2019–2022) concerns the symbolism, archaeology, and reception history of the Acropolis of Athens. Van Rookhuijzen’s work examines the role monuments played in the formation of Greek, European, and Western identities, disentangling stories about enemy action embedded within the discourse surrounding them. His research traces the role of such stories in a reviewed architectural history and topographical reconstruction of the Acropolis temples and has been featured in National Geographic.
Jason De León is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the director of the Undocumented Migration Project. He is the author of The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail. Follow him on Twitter @Jason_p_deleon.
Jason Vasser-Elong’s research focuses on identity in a postcolonial context. He was the 2022 SAPIENS poet-in-residence. He studied anthropology and later received his MFA from the University of Missouri, St. Louis, where he is currently a teaching professor in English and African American studies in the Pierre Laclede Honors College and a doctoral student in the College of Education. Vasser-Elong is the author of the poetry collection shrimp. His essay “Treading the Atlantic” was presented at the Canadian Association for the Advancement of Netherlandic Studies conference as an introduction to the keynote lecture on postcolonial memory. He also presented that essay at the American Anthropological Association’s conference “Truth and Responsibility” in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2021.
Jay Schwartz is a Ph.D. candidate in the psychology department at Emory University. As part of his M.A. in anthropology from Ohio State University, he studied howler monkey behavior in southern Mexico. Before that, he did volunteer work rehabilitating orphaned howler monkeys at the Alouatta Sanctuary in Panama. His current research focuses on vocal communication, emotion, and evolution in rhesus macaques and humans. Follow him on Twitter @jayrrulous.
Jay Silverstein is a senior lecturer in archaeology at Nottingham Trent University. He specializes in the archaeology of warfare and has extensive experience in the study of conflict, imperialism, and the rise and fall of complex societies. His doctoral research centered on the archaeology of the Aztec-Tarascan Imperial frontier. Silverstein also has 17 years of experience searching for people who were missing in action from past wars, including WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. As part of this effort, he developed Enterprise GIS to track the investigation and recovery of 80,000 missing persons. Silverstein is a director of the study of the Graeco-Roman city of Thmouis (Tell Timai) in the Nile Delta.
Jayne Wilkins is a paleoarchaeologist and Discovery Early Career Research Fellow at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University, Australia. She researches the origins of human adaptation, social learning, and sociality. Wilkins approaches her studies from three directions: archaeological excavation, lithic analysis, and experimental archaeology.
Jayur Madhusudan Mehta is an assistant professor in anthropology at Florida State University, specializing in the study of North American Native Americans, human-environment relationships, and the consequences of French and Spanish colonization in the Gulf South. He has led archaeological excavations in both the U.S. and Mexico, and he recently appeared in the documentary Keepers of the Mound. Mehta, a National Geographic Society research fellow, has published research in the fields of environmental archaeology, ethnohistory, and Indigenous religious and ritual practices. He is also an executive board member of the Gulf Communities Research Institute, a Louisiana-based nonprofit that works to preserve the health, resilience, and lifeways of coastal communities threatened by sea-level rise and climate change. See the Adams Bay documentary for more information.
Jean-Jacques Hublin, a paleoanthropologist, is the director of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. He also holds the international chair in paleoanthropology at the Collège de France in Paris, and he is the founder and president of the European Society for the Study of Human Evolution. The origins of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, and, most notably, the interactions between the two groups, have occupied a central place in his career. Follow him on Twitter @jjhublin.
Jeanette Moreland is an anthropologist, budget travel enthusiast, and media wonk. She received her M.A. in sociocultural anthropology from Binghamton University in New York, publishing a thesis on border theory and the anthropology of airports. An advocate of educational media, she currently works with U.K.-based Archaeosoup Productions, writing and producing videos and online content about anthropology and archaeology for public audiences. In her spare time, she volunteers on heritage projects and goes on backpacking trips. Follow her on Twitter @jeanetterz.
Jeannette Plummer Sires is a Spanish and American archaeologist, museum curator, and human remains specialist based in the U.K. She plays a pivotal role in promoting inclusivity and sustainability in archaeology as a board member of the Council for British Archaeology and founding member of the European Society of Black and Allied Archaeologists. Plummer Sires’ extensive international fieldwork spans Iceland, Antigua and Barbuda, Spain, Morocco, and the U.K. She is a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London and previously served as project curator of archaeological assemblages at the British Museum. Follow her on X, formerly Twitter, @JPlummerSires.
Jeffrey Bristol is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Boston University and a J.D. candidate at the University of Michigan Law School. He also holds an M.A. in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Chicago. He has conducted research on how Muslims use and understand Islamic law in Mauritania and in the United States, primarily focusing on the greater Boston area. Bristol is interested in Islamic law as it is practiced today and its development throughout history.
Jeffrey H. Cohen is a cultural anthropologist at Ohio State University who studies migration, rural development, and food in Mexico, Turkey, and China. He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1994. Cohen is the editor of the forthcoming book Handbook of Culture and Migration and the author of numerous articles and books, including Eating Soup Without a Spoon: Anthropological Theory and Method in the Real World and Cultures of Migration: The Global Nature of Contemporary Mobility (co-authored with Ibrahim Sirkeci). Currently, he directs the project Household Producer Effects of Rural Diet Transformation for the National Science Foundation.
Jeffrey H. Schwartz is an emeritus professor in the departments of anthropology and history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a research associate in the division of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. His publications span evolutionary and systematic theory, primate (including human) evolution and systematics, developmental and theoretical biology, and bioarchaeology. Schwartz’s books include The Human Fossil Record series, Sudden Origins: Fossils, Genes, and the Emergence of Species, The Red Ape: Orangutans and Human Origins, and Skeleton Keys: An Introduction to Human Skeletal Morphology, Development, and Analysis. In 1997, he began a detailed study of the human fossil record that has now encompassed virtually all known skulls, jaws, and teeth, as well as numerous pelvic and leg bones. Schwartz has been invited to write critical reviews of the uses and abuses of DNA analyses in human evolutionary studies, the most recent on mitochondrial DNA.
Jeffrey Hoelle is a cultural anthropologist who studies human-environment interactions in the Brazilian Amazon with a focus on land uses, livelihood strategies, and deforestation. He is the author of Rainforest Cowboys: The Rise of Ranching and Cattle Culture in Western Amazonia. An assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida in 2011. His current research focuses on perceptions of nature and the creation of space in Amazonia, as well as the integration of anthropological data and insights into research on global environmental change.
Jeffrey Shenton is a visiting assistant professor of anthropology at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. He teaches courses in cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, environmental anthropology, the anthropology of violence, the anthropology of tourism, the anthropology of religion, oral history, and writing. Shenton’s published research has examined the language and cognition of space and the environment in an Amazonian Kichwa community in Napo, Ecuador, and a Tzotzil Maya community in Chiapas, Mexico. He is deeply interested in the way that language frames understandings of and motivations toward action in the natural world. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Vanderbilt University in 2014.
Jemima Pierre is a sociocultural anthropologist and professor of African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of The Predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the Politics of Race. Pierre’s essays on global racial formation, Ghana, immigration, and African diaspora theory and politics have appeared in a number of academic journals, including Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Feminist Review, Social Text, Identities, Cultural Dynamics, Transforming Anthropology, Journal of Haitian Studies, Latin American Perspectives, American Anthropologist, and Philosophia Africana.
Jena Barchas-Lichtenstein leads media research and partnerships at the applied research think-tank Knology. They received their Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2013. They currently partner closely with news organizations to support the critical work of journalism in informing the public. They are co-principal investigator of Meaningful Math, a four-year National Science Foundation–funded project to help support public quantitative reasoning through journalism.
Jennifer A. Sandlin is an associate professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She received an M.A. in anthropology from the University of New Mexico and a Ph.D. in adult education from the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on the intersections of education, learning, and consumption, and on understanding and theorizing popular culture as public pedagogy. She recently published Disney, Culture, and Curriculum and Teaching With Disney (both co-edited with Julie C. Garlen). Her current projects focus on exploring post- and anti-humanist perspectives on Disney, and include analyses of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park and the animated movies Zootopia and Wall-E.
Jennifer Ashley is a cultural anthropologist who studies media and democracy in Latin America. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University and is a term associate professor at George Mason University. She is currently working on a bilingual digital humanities site that focuses on the 1988 plebiscite vote that marked the beginning of Chile’s return to democracy. Ashley has published numerous articles, including “Context as Content in Chilean Community Media” and “Prime-Time Politics: News, Parody, and Fictional Credibility in Chile.” Follow her on Twitter @jen_ashley.
Jennifer Lynn Kelly is an associate professor of feminist studies and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine, is a multisited interdisciplinary study that shows how solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Kelly’s next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen and Lila Sharif, is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, the next volume in the Detours Series at Duke University Press after the inaugural Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i. She is also a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.
Jennifer Raff is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas with a dual Ph.D. in anthropology and genetics, and more than 14 years of experience in researching ancient and modern human DNA from the Americas. In addition to her research, she has written on issues of scientific literacy and emerging research in genetics and anthropology at her own website, Violent Metaphors, and for The Guardian, HuffPost, Evolution Institute, and Forbes.
Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an associate professor of anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program and co-director of the Center for Indigenous Science. Her research interests sit at the intersections of Indigenous language futurism, Queer Indigenous studies, speculative fiction and poetry, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and repatriation, and collaborative/community-based methods. Her books include the poetry volume Trickster Academy, Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (which won the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures), and the co-edited volume Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (with Lal Zimman and Joshua Raclaw). Queer Excursions won the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association. Follow her on Instagram @Chickashajenny.
Jessaca Leinaweaver is a cultural anthropologist who studies families, adoption, and migration in Latin America and Spain. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor of anthropology and the director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. Leinaweaver is the author of The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru, which won the Margaret Mead Award in 2010. Her most recent book is Adoptive Migration: Raising Latinos in Spain. Follow her on Twitter @jessacabeza.
Jessica M. Smith is an anthropologist and associate professor in the engineering, design, and society department at the Colorado School of Mines, where she also directs humanitarian engineering graduate programs. Smith’s research interests center on public accountability and engineering, with a particular focus on the mining and energy industries. She is the author of Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West and Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility.
Jessica Madison Pískatá is a doctoral candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She holds an MFA in poetry from the New School in New York City and served as a teaching volunteer with the Peace Corps in Mongolia. Her research in eastern Mongolia exists at the intersection of poetics and environmental anthropology, and focuses on how creative genres mediate relations between humans and geological landscapes.
Jessica Taylor is a linguistic anthropologist whose work focuses on the intersections of anthropology, media studies, and gender studies. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is currently a research associate in women, gender, and sexuality studies at Harvard University. Her research examines the work of women writers in both new and old media, from ethnographic research on flexible labor and romance writers to discourse analysis of mommy bloggers. She is also currently working on a project on the media coverage of Uber in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in collaboration with Sheri Gibbings at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Jessica Thompson is an assistant professor of anthropology at Yale University and a paleoanthropologist/paleoarchaeologist who works primarily in Africa. She leads excavations in Malawi and has worked (or is working) on other archaeological projects in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and South Africa. Thompson seeks to understand the interactions between humans and human ancestors and their environments in ancient Africa. Her primary approaches are archaeological field recovery and zooarchaeology, or the analysis of animal bones from archaeological sites.
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Jill Neimark is a science journalist and an author of adult and children’s fiction. A former contributing editor at Discover Magazine, she has written for Scientific American, Science, Nautilus, Aeon, Undark, The New York Times, NPR, Quartz, and Psychology Today.
Jim O’Donnell is a freelance journalist, author, and conservation photographer who focuses on climate change adaptation, human migration, and public lands. He is the author of Notes for the Aurora Society and numerous articles, several sordid tales, many brilliant observations, a few half-finished novels, various angry letters to the editor, and other scribblings. O’Donnell lives in New Mexico with his two children. Follow him on Twitter @jimodonnell2.
Jo Setchell is a primatologist and professor of anthropology at Durham University.
Joakim Goldhahn is a Swedish archaeologist who has been working in Australia on and off since 2000. He graduated from Umeå University in 2000 with a Ph.D. thesis on north European rock art, and he worked as a professor of archaeology at Linnæus University in Sweden between 2009 and 2020. Since 2012, Goldhahn has participated in and led research on Aboriginal rock art in western Arnhem Land, including three Australian Research Council–funded projects. In 2020, he was appointed the Rock Art Australia Ian Potter Kimberley Chair at the Centre of Rock Art Research + Management at the University of Western Australia.
Joan Taylor is a professor of Christian origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College London. She approaches her work in a multidisciplinary manner: by incorporating literature, language, history, and archaeology. Taylor has written numerous books and articles in her fields of interest. Her latest book is What Did Jesus Look Like? Follow her on Twitter @profjoantaylor.
Joanna Mishtal is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on reproductive rights and policies in Poland, Ireland, and the EU. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is an associate professor at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland and a co-editor of A Fragmented Landscape: Abortion Governance and Protest Logics in Europe (with Silvia De Zordo and Lorena Anton). Mishtal is currently conducting research in the United Kingdom as a visiting fellow at the University of Kent’s law school in the Kent Centre for Law, Gender, and Sexuality.
Joanna Pearce is a fourth-year B.S. student at the University of Alberta in Canada. She has completed two education abroad experiences: an anthropological experiential health seminar in Shanghai, China, at Fudan University and a mortuary archaeology dig in Drawsko, Poland, with the Adam Mickiewicz University. Pearce co-authored an article in the Journal of Clinical Investigation about her team’s work in breast cancer research at the Cross Cancer Institute in Edmonton, Canada.
Joe Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, is the American Indian liaison officer, supervisory anthropologist, and chief of the Tribal Relations and American Cultures Program of the National Park Service in Washington, D.C. He was the director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma from 2007 to 2013 and an associate professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico from 2003 to 2007. His study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and the study of anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and populations, including American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, New Zealand Maori, and Japanese Ainu.
Joel C. Kuipers is a professor of anthropology and international affairs at George Washington University. He is a linguistic anthropologist who has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Indonesia and, more recently, in the U.S. on language and media among high school cellphone users and on COVID-19 funerals.
Joel Robbins is a sociocultural anthropologist whose work focuses on the study of values, ethics, and religion. His Ph.D. is from the University of Virginia, and he is currently the Sigrid Rausing Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the prize-winning book Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, and he is currently working on a book about the place of values in anthropological theory.
John Borneman received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and is currently a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. His fieldwork has been primarily in Germany and Syria, with ethnographic projects on the symbolic forms of political identification, the relation of the state to everyday life, kinship and sexuality, and forms of justice and accountability. His publications include Cruel Attachments: The Ritual Rehab of Child Molesters in Germany, Political Crime and the Memory of Loss, Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo, the edited volume Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority, and Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. His current research is on xenophobia, xenophilia, and forms of incorporation of the foreign in Germany.
John Edward Terrell is the Regenstein Curator of Pacific Anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago; a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Chicago; an adjunct professor of anthropology at Northwestern University; and an honorary fellow in anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His most recent book is A Talent for Friendship: Rediscovery of a Remarkable Trait. He is currently working on a new book with his son Gabe Terrell, with the working title Thoughts, Dreams, and Delusions: Why We Aren’t as Smart as We Think We Are. Terrell manages the Facebook group Museums & Global Heritage, which is dedicated to working on the care, interpretation, and celebration of world heritage collections through shared projects promoting co-curation, global heritage management, digital access to collections, and other activities central to reinventing museums in the 21st century as vigorous contributors to global understanding, heritage appreciation, and peace. His other websites are Science Dialogues and Marae Encounters.
John Hawks is a paleoanthropologist who specializes in the fossil and genetic record of human evolution. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and is currently the Vilas-Borghesi Distinguished Achievement Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is a co-author, with Lee Berger, of Almost Human: The Astonishing Tale of Homo naledi and the Discovery That Changed Our Human Story, about their work in the Rising Star Cave of South Africa. His blog has received international attention for its coverage of human evolution research. Follow him on Twitter at @johnhawks.
John Millhauser is an anthropological archaeologist whose research in Central Mexico investigates how communities are constituted, what they do, and how they influence social and ecological change. He earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern University and is an associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at North Carolina State University. His current work integrates economic anthropology and political ecology to better understand the roots of poverty and structural violence.
John S. Thomas is the deputy director of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services. He has directed many large-scale excavation projects with a particular expertise on ancient sites and landscape approaches. Two of these projects, at Humberstone and Beaumont Leys on the outskirts of Leicester, produced nationally important evidence for large-scale “aggregated” settlements from the Iron Age. Between 2010 and 2014, Thomas co-directed research excavations at Burrough Hill, the region’s best-preserved Iron Age hillfort, and in 2013, he directed the excavation of an extensive Iron Age settlement at Glenfield. Thomas has published widely, and to a range of audiences, through monographs, peer-reviewed articles in national and local journals, and popular archaeology publications. He is the honorary editor for the archaeological content of Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society.
John Schofield holds a Ph.D in prehistoric archaeology from Southampton University in England. He was employed for 21 years by English Heritage. In 2010, he was appointed the director of cultural heritage management studies at the University of York, and from 2012 to 2018, he served as head of the department of archaeology. Schofield is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists. He is also a docent in contemporary archaeology and cultural heritage in the archaeology department at Turku University in Finland, an adjunct professor at Griffith University in Australia, and a senior research fellow at Flinders University in Australia. His current research interests include social significance, cultural heritage participation and well-being, technological landscapes, music and place, and the application of archaeological methods to tackle marine plastic pollution.
Jonah S. Rubin is an assistant professor of anthropology at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. His research and teaching focus on memory, death, democracy, and human rights in Spain and Latin America. His writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Alteridades, and the International Journal of Transitional Justice. Follow him on Twitter @js_rubin.
Jonathan Gardner is an archaeologist and heritage researcher who studies the material traces of the contemporary world. He joined Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) in October 2020 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow to undertake a four-year research project studying the creation and use of waste-modified landscapes. His research examines different types of land reclamation, artificial hill building, dumping, and land art across the United Kingdom and how these are used and valued as creative spaces. Prior to joining ECA, Gardner was a teaching fellow in heritage and museum studies between 2017 and 2019 at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UCL). He has worked extensively as a commercial archaeologist excavating on construction sites throughout London and southeast England since 2007. His first monograph, developed out of his Ph.D. research, is titled A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events: From the Great Exhibition to London 2012.
Jonathan R. Goodman is an interdisciplinary researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies and at Cambridge Public Health who is interested in signaling systems, behavior, and health. Prior to his Ph.D., he was a postgraduate researcher in evolutionary biology at City University of New York and recently completed a fellowship at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. Goodman helped launch Cambridge Public Health, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Cambridge focused on major problems in global and public health. His writings have appeared in New Scientist, The Guardian, Scientific American, Aeon magazine, the BMJ, and The Lancet Digital Health.
Jonathan Walz is an archaeologist who studies the later archaeology of Africa. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Florida and is currently an assistant professor at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. His research addresses historical archaeology in East Africa, human linkages across the ancient Indian Ocean, and materials of ritual and healing.
Jordan Dalton is a research scientist at the American Museum of Natural History and the director of the Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológica Las Huacas. She works in the Chincha Valley of Peru, and her research addresses imperial expansion and practices of weight and measurement. Dalton is also passionate about public archaeology and working with communities around the site of Las Huacas.
Jordan Kiper is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His interests in anthropology and evolutionary theory center on cooperation and conflict. Before arriving at UCLA, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut. Kiper is a co-editor of the volume Perspectives on Forgiveness: Contrasting Approaches to Concepts of Forgiveness and Revenge (with Susie DiVietro) and has published over 20 articles covering topics on the anthropology of religion, law, and violence. His current work examines cross-cultural aspects of philosophy, moral psychology, and folk epistemology.
Robin Albarano, Kiper’s collaborator for this photo essay project, is a photographer and artist living in Los Angeles, California. As a photographer, she focuses on personality portraits and photographs that capture the lives of subjects, including veterans and survivors of armed conflicts.
Joseph Aguilar is from San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, and is a Senior Archaeologist with Bering Straits Native Corporation. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. His general research interests include Indigenous archaeology, museology, landscape archaeology, and Tribal historic preservation. Aguilar is interested in exploring the links between Tribal communities, anthropology, and museums. He has worked as an adviser to several institutions, including the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the de Young Fine Art Museum of San Francisco; the MARKK Museum in Hamburg, Germany; and the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe.
Joseph L. Graves Jr. is an evolutionary biologist who studies the genomic basis of adaptation in model organisms such as fruit flies and bacteria. He has also written extensively concerning biological and social conceptions of race in humans. He received his Ph.D. from Wayne State University and is currently a professor of biological sciences at North Carolina A&T State University. He is the author of The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America, and A Voice in the Wilderness: A Pioneering Biologist Explains How Evolution Can Help Solve Our Biggest Problems (in press). Graves is currently working on two National Science Foundation projects associated with microbial evolution in bacteria associated with metals and bacteriophages. Follow him on Twitter @gravesjl55.
Joseph Wilson is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistic and semiotic anthropology at the University of Toronto. His work examines how scientists use metaphor and other figurative language to communicate with one another in laboratory settings. He currently writes for the CBC, Spacing magazine, and The Globe and Mail, and has co-authored three books. Follow him on Twitter @josephwilsonca.
Josh Gabbatiss is a freelance science journalist based in London, U.K. His articles have appeared in New Scientist, Nautilus, Hakai Magazine, and the BBC, among other publications. Follow him on Twitter @Josh_Gabbatiss.
Josh Reno is a professor in the department of anthropology at Binghamton University in New York. He is the author of Waste Away: Working and Living With a North American Landfill and Military Waste: The Unexpected Consequences of Permanent War Readiness. He has also done research and written in the fields of critical disability studies, bio-semiotics, and critical race theory.
Josh Yarden has been slanting rhymes and exploring the tension between power lines for a very long time. He studies and teaches anthropology and critical thinking at the Givat Haviva International School, with Jews and Palestinian Arabs from Israel, and students from 25 other countries on five continents. Yarden received a B.A. in Middle East Studies from McGill University, an M.A. in Israel Studies from the University of Haifa, and a Ph.D. in Education, Culture, and Society from the University of Pennsylvania, where he wrote a dissertation on cultural transformation through reflective practice in experiential learning.
Joshua A. Bell is a cultural anthropologist who combines ethnographic fieldwork with research in museums to examine the shifting network of relationships between people, artifacts, and the environment. He is the curator of globalization and the acting director of the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. To date, Bell has carried out research in Papua New Guinea, Hawai’i, and the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. He has edited several books, including Linguistic and Material Intimacies of Cell Phones (with Joel C. Kuipers), and written articles on materiality, political ecology, the politics of heritage and museums, and cellphones. He co-directs the Smithsonian’s Recovering Voices’ Mother Tongue Film Festival and directs the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaABellDC.
Joshua Allan Lindal is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Manitoba in Canada. He is involved in ongoing paleoanthropological excavations in Serbia conducted by Belgrade University in collaboration with the University of Winnipeg.
Joshua Kumbani is a Ph.D. candidate in archaeology at the University of Witswatersrand in South Africa. His research interests lie in music archaeology, archaeoacoustics, ethnomusicology, experimental archaeology, and heritage management. Kumbani is a member of the Association of Southern African Professional Archaeologists.
Joshua Rapp Learn, a reporter who studied cultural anthropology as an undergraduate, covers stories about archaeology, the environment, and space. He writes for National Geographic, Scientific American, Archaeology, and Hakai Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaLearn1.
Josie Glausiusz is a freelance journalist who writes about science and the environment for Nature, National Geographic, Scientific American, Hakai Magazine, Aeon, and Undark Magazine. She is the former On Science weekly columnist for The American Scholar and the author of Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects. Her Hakai Magazine article “Land Divided, Coast United” won Amnesty International Canada’s 2015 Media Award (online media). Follow her on Twitter @josiegz.
Joss Whittaker is a doctoral candidate in archaeology at the University of Washington, Seattle. His research focuses on the relationships between geochemistry, trade networks, cultural exchange, and resistance in the Aru Islands, Maluku, Indonesia.
Jude Isabella writes about science and the environment for readers big and small. Her book Salmon: A Scientific Memoir explores the human relationship with Pacific salmon, noting that the modern relationship is very one-sided. Isabella’s latest book for kids, Bringing Back the Wolves, explores the ecological restoration of Yellowstone National Park in the United States. (Headshot by Grant Callegari.) Follow her on Twitter @judeisabella.
Julia K. Sloane is a psychological and medical anthropologist who studies disruption, transformative experiences, and the biocultural processes of development and aging. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, where she currently teaches. She enjoys interdisciplinary research and exploring deep tech-enabled futures and innovations with academic and industry-oriented groups, including Explorers’ Lab.
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, and Slate. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.
Julianne Yip is a sociocultural anthropologist trained at McGill University in Montreal. Her interest in more-than-human worlds led her to Arctic sea ice and the scientists who study it. She became interested in technological approaches to tackling environmental problems as a 2019–2020 Berggruen Institute research fellow in the Transformations of the Human program. Follow her on Twitter @JulianneYip.
Julie Dunne is a postdoctoral researcher in archaeology at the University of Bristol. Her doctoral research focused on investigating diet and subsistence practices of ancient groups in the “Green” Sahara of Holocene North Africa, using a combined archaeological, molecular, and isotopic approach.
Juliette Meling is an M.A. candidate in anthropology at San Diego State University and a state archaeologist for California’s Department of Parks and Recreation. Her research interests focus on the historical ecology of the Northern Channel Islands through the analysis of zooarchaeological materials. Meling is the author or editor of several archaeological technical reports and has extensive laboratory and field experience in southern California archaeology.
Justin Bracken is the acquisitions editor for archaeology and anthropology at the University of Utah Press. He completed his Ph.D. at the Graduate Center of City University of New York in 2021. His dissertation research investigated the fortifications and dwelling patterns at the ancient Maya site of Muralla de León in the Petén Lakes region of northern Guatemala, tracing occupational patterns through time. Bracken’s research focuses on patterns of movement and interaction, landscape studies, and spatial analyses of the built environment. Through such analyses, he has worked to demonstrate the specific impacts upon everyday life of war and defensive posturing.
Justin Bradfield is an associate professor of archaeology in the University of Johannesburg’s Palaeo-Research Institute. His main research interests center on the use of bone and other faunal materials in Stone Age societies and the degree to which an understanding of these items may better inform our appreciation of the diversity and complexity of ancient Indigenous knowledge systems. Bradfield’s research has focused on bone taphonomy, use-wear, and fracture mechanics as proxies for understanding tool function and how people in the past engaged with organic technology.
Justin D. Wright (as of 2023, Día Joy Wright) is a sociocultural anthropologist, performance studies scholar, theater artist, and performance poet. In both their scholarly and artistic pursuits, Wright is concerned with notions of national and cultural memories, transgenerational traumas, Black grief, and Black and Black-queer identity-making. Their work seeks to understand how Black people might craft from that pain, grief, and trauma something breathtakingly beautiful—and from that beauty, freedom and liberation. Wright holds an M.A. in theater and performance studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Wright is a Ph.D. student in anthropology at American University and was the 2020–2021 poet-in-residence at SAPIENS. Their poem “The Cookout (and All Other Manners of Heavenly Black Things)” was a finalist for the Best of the Net Anthology 2022. Follow them on Twitter @jd_thewright.
Justin Jennings is the curator of Latin American archaeology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. His fieldwork focuses on the first cities, states, and cultural horizons in the Andes, and he leads the museum’s repatriation and reconciliation efforts in Canada and elsewhere in the Americas. Jennings is the author or editor of 14 books, most recently Rethinking Global Governance: Learning From Long-Ignored Societies.
Justin Lau is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the Australian National University and a research assistant at the Education University of Hong Kong. He holds an M.Sc. in the anthropology of development from the London School of Economics. His doctoral research examines the politics of waste technologies in Cambodia. He has two forthcoming articles in the Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology and Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space.
Justin R. Garcia is an assistant professor of gender studies and an assistant research scientist at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, Bloomington. Garcia holds an M.S. in biomedical anthropology and a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from SUNY Binghamton University. He is a co-author of Evolution and Human Sexual Behavior and a co-editor of Evolution’s Empress: Darwinian Perspectives on the Nature of Women. His research focuses on evolutionary and biocultural foundations of romantic love, intimacy, and sexual behavior. He is also a scientific adviser to the online dating company Match.com.
Justine Quijada is an anthropologist of religion who studies ritual, shamanism, comparative secularisms, and post-Soviet shamanic revival. Her book, Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets: Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia, recently won first best book in the History of Religions from the American Academy of Religion. Quijada has received research funding from the University of Chicago, the International Research and Exchanges Board, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (previously the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), the Max Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, and Wesleyan University, including Wesleyan University’s College of the Environment.
Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia is a Lhopo religious studies scholar from west Sikkim in northeast India. He is a visiting fellow at the East Asian Studies Center, University of Southern California. He studies relationships between human and more-than-human communities in Sikkim, and makes traditional prayer flags for communities around his home region.
Kamari Maxine Clarke is a Distinguished professor at the University of Toronto and the director of the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. She is also an adjunct professor in the anthropology department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Clarke has published nine books and over 50 peer-refereed journal articles and book chapters. Her monographs include Affective Justice, Fictions of Justice, and Mapping Yorùbá Networks. Clarke has received the 2019 Royal Anthropological Institute’s Amaury Talbot Book Prize, a distinguished chair in transnational justice and socio-legal studies, and the 2021 Guggenheim Prize for career excellence. Follow her on Twitter @KamMClarke.
Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles; a bestselling author; and a popular speaker. She specializes in craft production, coffin studies, and ancient economies. Cooney is the author of The Good Kings, which published in 2021. She was a co-curator of Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and produced a related archaeology television series, Out of Egypt, now airing on Hulu. Follow her on Twitter @KaraCooney.
Karen Coates writes primarily about food, environment, health, and human rights in developing societies. She has a background in anthropology, which she has always thought a natural match for journalism. Coates is a senior fellow at Brandeis University’s Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, and her latest book, co-authored with her husband and partner Jerry Redfern, is Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos. Follow her on Twitter @RamblingSpoon.
Karen L. Kramer is an anthropologist with research interests in the evolution of cooperation, human sociality, life history, and childhood. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of New Mexico and was a postdoctoral fellow in demography at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1990s. Kramer has worked with the Savanna Pumé, a group of South American hunter-gatherers, and the Yucatec Maya for the past 25 years. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the William F. Milton Fund, the Smithsonian Institution, and Harvard University.
Karine Gagné is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Guelph in Canada. Her research is based in the Indian Himalayas, where she studies climate change, climate knowledge, ethics of care, human-nonhuman animal relations, state production, and citizenship. Gagné is the author of Caring for Glaciers: Land, Animals, and Humanity in the Himalayas, for which she received the 2019 James Fisher Prize. She is currently working on a project, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, to study how a limited technocratic understanding of the climate and related processes, like climate change, contributes to the vulnerability of mountain populations.
Karminn C.D. Daytec Yañgot, a Kankana-ey, is an anthropologist by passion and a development worker by profession. She is the anthropology teaching fellow in the Indigenous studies Ph.D. program at the University of the Philippines, Baguio. Her research and development work focus on Indigenous peoples and claims-making in the Philippines, as well as political constructions and (re)presentations of Indigeneity. She is also interested in issues of human rights and transitional justice, collective flourishing, and storytelling as a research method. Follow her on Threads and Instagram @indigena.ph.
Karolina Follis is a lecturer at Lancaster University in the U.K. and a political anthropologist who specializes in borders, particularly regimes of control and security, human rights, and systems of responsibility. Her areas of expertise are the European Union and East and Central Europe.
Katarina Zimmer is a science and environment journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Knowable Magazine, The Scientist, National Geographic, and more.
Kate Ruder is a health and science journalist whose stories have appeared in NBC Health, 5280.com, and Everyday Health, and in magazines such as Colorado Parent, Spoke + Blossom, and Boulder Weekly. She lives with her family in Boulder, Colorado.
Katharine Gammon is a freelance science writer based in Santa Monica, California. Her work has appeared in Nature, Wired, Popular Science, and other media outlets. When not writing about the environment, child development, or innovation, she gets to watch her two young sons innovate their own environments. Follow her on Twitter @kategammon.
Katharine Keenan is a cultural anthropologist and a postdoctoral fellow of Western heritage at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2013 in applied anthropology, with a dissertation titled Imagining a New Belfast: Municipal Parades in Urban Regeneration. Her research lies at the intersection of the anthropology of policy, performance, urban space, and post-conflict development. Her work can be found in the recent publication Consuming St. Patrick’s Day. She is currently developing a new project in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Katherine A. Mason is an assistant professor of anthropology at Brown University who has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in China and the U.S. Her research addresses issues in medical anthropology, population health, bioethics, China studies, reproductive health, mental health, and global health. Her first book, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health After an Epidemic, based on fieldwork she conducted in southeastern China on the professionalization and ethics of public health in the country following the 2003 SARS epidemic, won the Foundation for the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize in 2019.