Congratulations to our 2024 Anthropology Honors Students!

Read more about this year’s honors students and their projects on our 2024 Honors Students page.

(left to right: Dr. Robert Paul, Sarah Vickery-Hartanto*, Kevin Gunawardana*, Elizabeth Whiteside, Isabel Staton, Ezra Packard, Emily Silver, Sona Davis, Eric Li) *Sarah and Kevin are on track to graduate with honors in December 2024.

Sona Davis
Thesis Title: Investigating the role of the BAF Complex in Human Disease and Evolution
Advisor: David Gorkin, John Lindo

Maddie Hasson
Thesis Title: Guiding Cell Perception of its Microenvironment for Enhanced Microfracture Repair
Advisor: Jay Patel, Craig Hadley

Raya Islam
Thesis Title: Mapping Bengali New York
Advisor: Yami Rodriguez

Emily Jang
Thesis Title: Exploring Beliefs & Identity: The Internal & External World of Asian Americans
Advisor: Chikako Ozawa-de Silva, Brendan Ozawa-de Silva

Qucheng (Eric) Li
Thesis Title: Sinicizing Muslims: Haunting, Punitiveness, and Sacrifice in Neoliberalizing China
Advisor: Michael Peletz

Ezra Packard
Thesis Title: The Stories Behind Atlanta Food Growing: Oral History and Exhibition as Research Method
Advisor: Kristin Phillips, Jonathan Coulis

Emily Silver
Thesis Title: Community Organizing in Atlanta: Perspectives from the AIDS Crisis and COVID-19 Pandemic
Advisor: Rachel Hall-Clifford

Andrea Snoddy
Thesis Title: Myths and Medicine: Analyzing Medical Racism in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area
Advisor: John Lindo

Isabel Staton
Thesis Title: Farmers in the Storm: Exploring Alternative Risk Management Strategies Amid Winter Storm Elliott
Advisor: Hilary King

Phoebe Taiwo
Thesis Title: Examining the Relationship Between Physical and Mental Comorbidities and Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Serostatus in Black Women
Advisor: Anna Rubstova

Elizabeth Whiteside
Thesis Title: Uncovering Menopause in Tufted Capuchin Monkeys (Sapajus apella): Analyzing the Relationship between Estradiol, Aging, and Behavioral Estrus in a Captive Population
Advisor: Marcela Benitez

Congratulations to our 2024 Anthropology student award winners!

2024 Anthropology Student Awards

The Anthropology Department is pleased to announce our 2024 student award winners! Undergraduate awards were presented at our annual Honors and Awards Ceremony on Friday, April 26th. For award descriptions and past winners, visit our Departmental Awards webpage.  We are so proud of our many impressive students.  Please join us in congratulating them!

Outstanding Senior Award: 

  • Eric Li
  • Ezra Packard
  • Elizabeth Whiteside

Outstanding Junior Award: 

  • Krishna Sanaka

Marjorie Shostak Award for Excellence and Humanity in Ethnography:

  • AJ Jones  for her dissertation “Performing the Missing X: Sex, Gender, Disability, and Ambivalent Identity Politics in the United States”, advised by Chikako Ozawa-de Silva and nominated by Bruce Knauft.
  • Sasha Tycko for her photographic installation “Ways of the Atlanta Forest”, advised by Anna Grimshaw.
  • Galya Fischer for her Capstone project “Side by Side: An Exploration of Accessibility and Anthropological Research”, advised by Anna Grimshaw.

Trevor E. Stokol Scholarship for Undergraduate Research 2024-25:

  • Peter Attarian
  • Kaela Goldstein
  • Kevin Gunawardana
  • Sarah Jung
  • Lydia King

George Armelagos Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student:

  • Katy Lindquist
  • Sophie Joseph

Two Row Repair: A Trilogy, a poem by Professor Debra Vidali is published in the American Anthropological Society journal, Anthropology and Humanism.

Anthropology Professor Debra Vidali poem, Two Row Repair: A Trilogy, which is featured in the March 2024 issue of the American Anthropological Association journal, Anthropology and Humanism. An abstract and early view of the poem can be accessed on the online library, AnthroSource and a journal issue will be available in the Emory University library later this Spring. Vidali received first place in the 2023 Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s 37th Annual Ethnographic Poetry Competition for Parts II and III of this trilogy.

Anthropology PhD Student Sasha Tycko unveils her exhibition of photographs, “Ways of the Atlanta Forest” to the public.

The Anthropology department just celebrated the opening of “Ways of the Atlanta Forest,” an exhibition of photographs by one of our PhD candidates, Sasha Tycko (C’19). The exhibition is based on Tycko’s dissertation research, which focuses on the life of the “Atlanta forest,” the site of intense conflict over the City of Atlanta’s plan to build a police training complex known as “Cop City.” Over two years, Tycko lived and worked in the forest, using a range of media, including analogue photography, to explore how the abandoned forest landscape—formerly the site of a city prison farm and a slave plantation—motivates new articulations of history, nature, and ethics. Working with the visual language of landscape photography, Tycko’s photographs cast the landscape as a layered repository of history and imagination.

This exhibition inaugurates the Department of Anthropology’s new exhibition space, which is meant to foster dialogue across campus and stimulate debate about what might constitute an engaged anthropology.

There will be a public discussion about “Ways of the Atlanta Forest” between Sasha Tycko and Jason Francisco (Film & Media, Visual Arts) on March 19th, from 1:00pm – 2:30pm in Anthropology building room 206. All photographs are gelatin silver prints handmade by Tycko in Emory’s chemical darkroom.

Sasha Tycko also recently published an essay based on her dissertation research, “Not One Tree,” in n+1 magazine.

Anthropology Graduate Katy Lindquist (C’18) receives Klarman Fellowship in the College of Arts & Sciences at Cornell University!

Katy Lindquist, Anthropology graduate, received a 3-year Postdoctoral Associate position in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University starting fall following her PhD completion here at Emory University in the Department of Anthropology. The Klarman Fellowship in the College of Arts & Sciences provide postdoctoral opportunities to early-career scholars conducting researching in any discipline. Recipients may conduct research in any discipline and are offered independence and enabled to devote themselves to innovative research without being constrained to specific outcomes or teaching responsibilities.

Katy Lindquist is featured on Cornell University’s website under the Current Fellows. Congratulations Katy!

New book by Professor Peter Little is now available: “Advanced Introduction to Economic Anthropology”

Professor Peter D. Little, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Anthropology and Director of Global Development Studies, recently published a book titled, Advanced Introduction to Economic Anthropology. 

The book illustrates how an anthropological perspective can deepen understandings of customary and global markets; different types of money; diversified livelihoods of the poor; gendered and racialized labor; climate change and other global issues. By questioning common dichotomies, such as the informal versus formal sectors and customary versus modern institutions, the book uncovers those hidden connections, power relations, and economic actors and processes that underpin real economies throughout the world.

Get up to 20% discount when you order online at Edward Elgar Publishing.
You may also purchase a copy from Amazon.

Congratulations to Dr. Peggy Barlett for receiving AASHE Lifetime Achievement Award

On December 7th, Dr. Peggy F. Barlett, Goodrich C. White Professor Emerita of Anthropology, received the AASHE Lifetime Achievement Award for her dedication to sustainability in higher education. Dr. Barlett was instrumental in the founding of Emory’s Piedmont Project, training over 640 faculty members from 350+ institutions, and catalyzing a widespread adoption of sustainability-focused curriculum across these institutions. 

Her impact extends beyond academia, shaping Emory’s sustainable food initiatives and achieving significant milestones in campus dining sustainability. As a respected author and leader in sustainable education, Dr. Barlett’s contributions span many influential publications and articles.

Read more about Dr. Barlett’s work here.

Emory Anthropology Professor Debra Vidali wins international ethnographic poetry contest.

Emory University anthropologist, Professor Debra Vidali is awarded first place in the 2023 Ethnographic Poetry Competition of the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Humanistic Anthropology. Vidali, a sociocultural anthropologist whose work centers on experimental ethnography and ethnographic theater, won for a set of two experimental poems, “Two Row Repair II” and “Two Row Repair III.” The titles refer to the Two Row Wampum belt that encodes the first treaty between Europeans and Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois Confederacy. The judges praised the connections, saying Vidali’s work “not only speaks about, but embodies, decolonial praxis in a historically anchored way.” Vidali accepted the award in person and read the poetry last month at the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s annual award ceremony in Toronto.

She says she was motivated to write the poems after a 2022 research journey to find the original location where the Two Row agreement occurred in 1613 between Dutch and Mohawk, near the port of present-day Albany, New York. “The Two Row Wampum is a foundational treaty extending into the present. It conveys expected relations between Haudenosaunee and people of European descent to co-exist in peace, respect and friendship, and in common stewardship for all orders of life, including rivers, plants, animals and earth itself,” Vidali says.

“As a non-Indigenous person who was born and raised on Haudenosaunee lands, and whose ancestors go back to Dutch settlers in the Hudson Valley in the 1630s, I strive to honor this treaty and to communicate to others about it,” she adds. “With the set of poems, I activate and inscribe a journey of ancestral reckoning using the unique affordances of experimental ethnographic writing. It was a deep honor to receive the award, and to have it conferred on Haudenosaunee lands in Tkaronto (Toronto).”

Read the full article here!

Professor Debra Vidali’s ethnographic theater project in Toronto featured University of Minnesota Duluth blog.

Professor Debra Vidali presented her ethnographic theater project at a meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Toronto recently in November 2023 and has been featured in a blog by Dr. Mitra Emad, the Associate Dean at the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Dr. Emad at this to say about Professor Vidali’s project:

“Recently at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, I attended a follow-up event to a workshop in which anthropologists explored theater making initiatives by clearing a room of furniture and embodying/acting out the text of on ethnographer’s fieldnotes. Many of them had never met before this experiment and the workshop organizer, Debra Vidali (Emory University) functioned as the group’s choreographer. Vidali managed to choreograph a quick (“moving at the speed of light”) and profound sense of belonging in a context (academic conferences) that rarely attend to the body or the flow of resilience that moves between and among the participants. Watching the re-enact and comment upon their experience at a roundtable event the next day, I was struck by how working in and through their bodies to explicate the fieldnotes quickly created a powerful and productive sense of belonging for the impromptu group.”

Read the full blog here!

Anthropology Prof. Robert Paul and Emory celebrates 25 years of expanding compassion and ethics through science.

What began as the brainchild of Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi and Robert Paul was formalized as the Emory-Tibet Partnership in 1998 and renewed Monday at the beginning of Tibet Week.

Celebrating 25 years, the renewal of the partnership between Emory University and the Drepung Loseling Monastery included senior leadership from the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, Institute of Buddhist Dialects, and Emory University leaders President Gregory L. Fenves, Provost Ravi V. Bellamkonda and Emory College Dean Barbara Krauthamer who reviewed the Memorandum of Understanding, signed in 1998 in the presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, with the current abbot of Drepung Loseling.

Read the full article here!