Month: May 2019

Anthropology Celebrates Record Number of Honors Graduates

 

Honors 2019
Left to right: Sierra Stubbs, Abbe McCarter, Sarah Elmongy, Aditi Majoe, Dr. Kristin Phillips, Anna Glass, Karina Collins, Kristen Kaufman, Lila Bilsky. Not pictured: Katya Bobrek, Neharika Penmetcha.

The Anthropology department is proud to recognize a record number of honors graduates for 2019!  This year, ten Anthropology students successfully defended honors theses, the culmination of a year (or more!) of independent research and writing. Their projects were completed under the supervision of faculty advisors and committee members from within and outside of Anthropology, with support from faculty honors coordinator Dr. Kristin Phillips.  Topics ranged from art forgery to opioid use disorder to genomic analysis, representing the wide variety of applications for anthropological study. These students were honored at the Anthropology Honors and Awards Luncheon on April 26th, and graduated with honors at ceremonies on May 12 and 13.

Please see below for a full list of theses, and join us in congratulating these students on their hard work and accomplishment!

Lila Bilsky – Parental Perceptions and Preferences of Asthma Medication Delivery Devices in a Pediatric Emergency Room
Advised by Carol Worthman and Peter Brown

Katya Bobrek – Genomic Analysis and Natural Selection Scan of Mexican Mayan and Indigenous Populations
Advised by John Lindo

Karina Collins – Community Stigma and Opioid Use Disorder in Southern West Virginia
Advised by Karen Hegtvedt (Sociology)

Sarah Elmongy – Western Perceptions of Arab Women & Their Lived Identities as Women
Advised by Craig Hadley

Anna Glass – The Price of Forgery: An Anthropological Perspective on the Value of Fine Art
Advised by Bobby Paul

Kristen Kaufman – Sustainability, Being, and Reconciliation: Decolonizing Nature and the Australian Imaginary
Advised by Alice Reznickova (Ripon College, WI) and Kristin Phillips

Aditi Majoe – Behavior, Learning, and Lithics: Understanding the Process of Learning and Handaxe Production through Behavior
Advised by Dietrich Stout

Abbe McCarter – Windows into the Lived Experiences and Health Consequences of Food Insecurity on the Cattaraugus Reservation: Implications for Indigenous Peoples’ Food Sovereignty
Advised by Debra Vidali

Neharika Penmetcha – Zooarchaeological Faunal Identifiability: Using GIS Technology to Facilitate Analysis of Gracile Long Bone Specimens
Advised by Jess Thompson (Yale) and John Lindo

Sierra Stubbs – Do Food and Drinks Have Gender?: Cultural Conceptions of Food Types among Emory Undergraduates
Advised by Peter Brown

A list of all previously completed Anthropology honors theses is available on our website.

Anthropology Major Farah Al Chammas receives prestigious 2019 Bobby Jones Scholarship

Al_Chammas_Farah (1)Anthropology and Human Biology Major Farah Al Chammas is one of four outstanding Emory seniors who will be attending the University of St. Andrews in Scotland on the Bobby Jones Scholarship.

“Emory has changed my life in every possible way and the Bobby Jones Scholarship is ensuring that that continues beyond my time at Emory. [At the University of St. Andrews] I will be pursuing a Masters in International Development Practice, which is an interdisciplinary degree that allows me to enjoy the taste of Emory’s liberal arts nature that I so loved and capitalized on as an undergraduate. It is an honor to be a representative for this institution that has opened my world so I can grow and give back to Emory itself and beyond.”

Congratulation Farah!

The Anthropology Department is pleased to announce our 2019 student award winners!

Award Winners Photo 2019.jpg
Left to right: Hannah Katz, Esther Garcia, Klamath Henry (winner of Emory’s Brittain Award, as featured in another post), Sierra Stubbs, Grace Jarrett.

Please join us in congratulating undergraduates Esther Garcia, Grace Jarrett, Hannah Katz, and Sierra Stubbs, and graduate students Andrea Rissing, Christina Rogers, and Adeem Suhail.  Undergraduate awards were distributed at the Honors and Awards Luncheon on Friday, April 26.  See below for detailed award descriptions.  We are so proud of our many talented and engaged students!

 

2019 Undergraduate Student Awards

Outstanding Senior Award: Sierra Stubbs

Outstanding Senior Honorable Mention: Esther Garcia

Outstanding Junior Award: Hannah Katz

Marjorie Shostak Prize for Excellent and Humanity in Ethnographic Writing: Grace Jarrett for her paper “The Hair Salon: A Black Female Geography”

2019 Graduate Student Awards:

Marjorie Shostak Prize for Excellent and Humanity in Ethnographic Writing: Adeem Suhail for his dissertation “THIS IS NOT A GANG: Proxy Classes and Political Subjection in Lyari”

George Armelagos Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student: Andrea Rissing and Christina Rogers

 

Award Descriptions:

Outstanding Senior

For an Anthropology senior who has shown significant achievement in their undergraduate career, both academically as well as through extraordinary engagement and/or service relevant to their study in Anthropology.

Outstanding Junior

For an Anthropology junior who shows great promise at this stage in their undergraduate career, both academically as well as through extraordinary engagement and/or service relevant to their study in Anthropology. 

Marjorie Shostak Prize for Excellence and Humanity in Ethnographic Writing

In 1999 The Department of Anthropology announced the establishment of the “Marjorie Shostak Prize” to be awarded each year to an Emory student whose paper reflects original research on some aspect of human life experience.  The prize commemorates the life and work of Marjorie Shostak, author of Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1981, republished 2000) and the sequel Return to Nisa (Harvard, 2000). These works were highly praised for the immediacy of the writing, the personal character of the ethnographic encounters, and the complete absence of jargon, without any sacrifice of anthropological accuracy or validity. The presence of the ethnographer as an individual in these writings gave the reader an opportunity to take her perspective and biases into account in evaluating the descriptions and interviews.

The award is bestowed on papers/theses that take a direct, personal approach to ethnography, without sacrificing validity or analysis, in keeping with the spirit of Shostak’s work. In the best submissions, human beings will come alive on the page, giving the reader a strong experience of the culture those people belong to. The writer will also attempt to analyze or interpret the experience, but with a minimum of jargon.

George Armelagos Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student

This annual award is to recognize graduate students in Anthropology who have demonstrated excellence in undergraduate teaching during their time at Emory. One goal of our graduate program is to develop the teaching skills of all doctoral students.  This award is given based on a student’s record in teaching and contributions to the undergraduate program over the entire span of their career at Emory.  The award is funded through an endowment set up by the late Professor George Armelagos – a distinguished scholar, teacher, and mentor.  It was his desire that the department recognize graduate students who are exceptional teachers, and that this recognition might help them on the job market.