The University Research Committee (URC) has awarded the research team of Dr. David Civitello, Associate Professor of Biology (Principal Investigator) and Dr. Peter Little, Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology (Co-Investigator), a $40,000 Interdisciplinary – URC-Halle Institute Global Research Award for their project Linking Movement Patterns of Ranging Livestock Herds in Mwanza, Tanzania to Transmission Potential of Human Schistosomes.
Emory University and Anthropology Alumni Daniel K. Thompson publishes book titled Smugglers, Speculators, and the City in the Ethiopia-Somalia Borderlands.
Daniel graduated from Emory University with his PhD in 2019 and is now an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Merced. His research focused on exploring eastern African and US migration, border-making and how urbanization shaped economic strategies for handling uncertainty.
First page excerpt: “For a century, the Ethiopian city Jigjiga was known as a dusty hub of cross-border smuggling and a hotbed of rebellion on Ethiopia’s eastern frontier. After 2010, it transformed into a post-conflict boomtown, becoming one of Africa’s fastest-growing cities and attracting Somali return-migrants from across the globe. This study examines Jigjiga’s astonishing transformation through the eyes of its cross-border traders, urban businesspeople, and officials. Daniel K. Thompson follows traders and return-migrants across borders to where their lives collide in the city. Analysing their strategies of mobility and exchange, this study reveals how Ethiopia’s federal politics, Euro-American concerns about terrorism, and local business aspirations have intertwined to reshape links between border-making and city-making in the Horn of Africa. To understand this distinctive brand of urbanism, Thompson follows globalized connections and reveals how urbanites in Africa and beyond participate in the “urban borderwork” of constructing, as well as contesting, today’s border management regimes.”
Smugglers, Speculators, and the City in the Ethiopia-Somalia Borderlands by Daniel K. Thompson is available for purchase online.
Congratulations to our graduating students who received honors from their thesis.
Read more about this year’s honors students and their projects on our 2025 Honors Students page.
Honors Students
Helen Andrade
Thesis Title: Cultural perceptions of Autism Among Hispanic Youth
Advisor: Dr. John Lindo
Maya Ashe
Thesis Title: I Am Smart, I am Kind…and I Am Black: Examining Black Motherhood in the 21stCentury
Advisor: Dr. Bayo Holsey
Peter Attarian
Thesis Title: Outside the Grid: Self-Reliant Communities in the Ouachita Mountains
Advisor: Dr. Kristin Phillips
Neha Bajaj
Thesis Title: Distinct Resting-State Functional Brain Connectivity Profiles in Healthy Aging and Parkinson’s Disease-Driven Neurodegeneration
Advisor: Dr. Madeleine Hackney and Dr. John Lindo
Jada Brown
Thesis Title: Sunshine and Exclusion: The Legacy of Sundown Towns in a Tourist Paradise
Advisor: Dr. Bayo Holsey
Grace Cayless
Thesis Title: Early Life Adversity in Chimpanzees: The Role of Disease Exposure
Advisor: Dr. Bayo Holsey
Ava Coates
Thesis Title: Ancient Greek Legacy in Sicily: Traversing fromt he Ancient to theModern
Advisor: Dr. Sandra Blakely
Julianna Cruz
Thesis Title: Behind the Statistics: Deconstructing the Sociocultural Contexts of Hispanic and Latinx Patient Outcomes, Undocumented Narratives, and Underrepresentation in Kidney Disease Research
Advisor: Dr. John Lindo
Maura Dianno
Thesis Title: Effectiveness of the Implementation of Routing Screening of Relative Energy Dificiency Syndrome in Female Atheletes
Advisor: Dr. John Lindo
Kaela Goldstein
Thesis Title: Weaving Two Worlds: The Next Generations of Ethiopian Jewelry in Israel
Advisor: Dr. Don Seeman
Shriya Iyer
Thesis Title: At the Interface of the Human Host and Bacteria: Stress Signaling Via Cyclic AMP and Calcium
Advisor: Dr. Rabindra Tirouvanziam
Sarah Jung
Thesis Title: Exploring Motives for Participation in Genomic Research
Advisor: Dr. Rohan Palmer
Isabella Kaufman
Thesis Title: Identification of long-acting HIV-1 antiviral pairings and analysis of societal implications of shifting patient-care models
Advisor: Dr. Craig Hadley and Dr. Stefan Sarafianos
Lydia King
Thesis Title: Promoting Effective Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Communication Materials, Through a Multidisciplinary Analysis of Community Health Practices in Gombe-Masito-Ugalla Ecosystem
Advisor: Dr. Craig Hadley and Dr. Gillespie
Anusha Kothari
Thesis Title: Qualitative Analysis of Influences Behind Lifestyle Behaviors Regarding Cardiometobolic Health in South Asian Immigrants
Advisor: Dr. Harshita Kamath and Dr. Bobby Paul
Anna Little
Thesis Title: Ethnographic Theater for Memory Care Residents
Advisor: Dr. Debra Vidali
Fiona Meyer
Thesis Title: The Intertwined and Independent Predictive Roles of Maternal Age, Anti-Müllerian Hormone (AMH), and Oocyte Quantity during In Vitro Fertilization (IVF)
Advisor: Dr. Alicia Smith and Dr. Anna Knight
Shreya Ramanathan
Thesis Title: Assessing Barriers to Preventative Cancer Screening & Care for Refugee and Immigrant Women in Georgia
Advisor: Dr. Saria Hassan
Rashimi Raveendran
Thesis Title: What’s Good for the Goose May Not Be Good for the Gander: An Analysis of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Comprehension Amonst South Asians and Providers
Advisor: Dr. Craig Hadley
Zinnia Robinson
Thesis Title: The Ballroom Masquerade: Gen-Z’s Dance with AAE and Intersectional Language
Advisor: Dr. Erica Britt
Kylie Taylor
Thesis Title: Exploring Endothelial Cell Sources for Brain Vasculature Modeling in 2D and 3D Cultures
Advisor: Dr. Steven Sloan
Donna Torres
Thesis Title: Language and Care: Access to Healthcare Among Hispanic Communities
Advisor: Dr. Don Seeman
Congratulations to our 2025 Student Award Winners!
2025 Anthropology Student Awards
The Anthropology Department is pleased to announce our 2025 student award winners! Undergraduate awards are presented at our annual Honors and Awards Ceremony on Friday, April 25. We are so proud of our many impressive students. Please join us in congratulating them!
Outstanding Senior Award: Peter Attarian, Grace Cayless, and Marian Moss
Outstanding Junior Award: Yijia “Jackie” Zhou
Trevor E. Stokol Scholarship(awarded for 2025-26): Theodore Lin, Demissie Mahliet, Jaanaki Radhakrishnan, Daniel Sorungbe, Sasha Trukhnova, Anna Yego
Marjorie Shostak Award, Undergraduate: Peter Attarian and Marian Moss
Marjorie Shostak Award, Graduate: Peter Habib and Sana Noon
George Armelagos Award: Peter Habib, Sarah Kovalaskas, and Will Boose
Emory College students (left-to-right) Lydia King, David Lee, Elizabeth Martin and Lucas San Miguel have been selected to be Bobby Jones Scholars at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.
Read full article here.
“Lydia King,
A Dean’s Scholar and Oxford College graduate who grew up in Rwanda and Kenya, Lydia King first cultivated her college community at the Oxford Organic Farm. The experience inspired her to start Oxford’s campus garden, as well as Emory’s gardening club on the Atlanta campus.
Her interest in her fellow student farm workers prompted her first anthropological study — ethnographies on the role that the work played in student mental health — and led to a double major in linguistics and anthropology and human biology. She later crafted a research project on the language of undergraduate reflection, which was presented in the U.S. and at Lancaster University in the U.K.
At every step since, King has combined what one recommender called a “profound ability to connect with people” with a passion for communication and public health to become a leader in several academic, community and research endeavors.
On campus, she served as a leader with Volunteer Oxford and Volunteer Emory, a tutor at the Emory Writing Center and president of the Emory Gender Expansive and Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team. King also volunteered with Open Hand Atlanta and the International Rescue Committee.
Her interest in connections between place and health led to an internship on the education team of the CDC Museum in Atlanta, and last summer, work as a community engagement intern with the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda. She also works in the lab of Emory environmental scientist Tom Gillespie, conducting a qualitative analysis of interviews of community members and health care workers who live in the regions surrounding Gombe National Park in Tanzania. She received the Trevor E. Stokol scholarship for the project, as she expands her research for her honors thesis.
King will pursue a master’s of research in social anthropology at St Andrews, combining ethnographic research and linguistic analysis on the study of zoonotic diseases. She plans to pursue a career in global health, promoting more effective research and communication between the U.S. and nations of East Africa.”
Congratulations Lydia!
Photo of Sasha by Peter Habib
Anthropology graduate student Sasha Tycko was awarded the Krause Essay Prize from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program for her essay, “Not One Tree“.
“Sasha Tycko is an anthropologist and artist working on a PhD at Emory University. Her research focuses on the Atlanta forest at the center of the conflict over “Cop City,” using a range of media to explore how the contested landscape motivates new articulations of history, nature, and ethics. Through this work, she has produced two films, Dwelling: A Measure of Life in the Atlanta Forest and Atlanta Forest Garden: Four Days of Work, and a photography exhibition, “Ways of the Atlanta Forest.”
The Krause Essay Prize is awarded annually to the work that best exemplifies the art of essaying. Nominations for the Krause Essay Prize are made each year by a committee of writers, filmmakers, radio producers, visual artists, editors, and readers.
Congrats Sasha!
Contaminating Humanitarianism: Cholera, Nationalism, and the (Un)Regulated Life of Syrians in Lebanon
The MESA Graduate Student Paper Prize was established in 2004 and first given in 2005. The purpose of the award is to recognize the work of young scholars. The award is given to the paper that shows the best control of the subject matter and adept methodology, good use of sources and evidence, coherence and elegance of argument and good writing.
Read Peter Habib’s award announcement here!
Dylan Plemper, Anthropology major, has been awarded a $500 travel grant to attend meetings of the American Institute of Archaeology. Their advisor is Professor Petra Creamer from the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies (MESAS).
Congratulations to Dylan for this amazing opportunity!
Anthropology Visiting Assistant Professor Nikola Johnson was awarded the 2024 Wenner-Gren Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship Grant to support 9 months of writing to complete a monograph based on research conducted for his dissertation, titled Emergent Citizenships: Mapuche (Indigenous) and Chilean (non-Indigenous) Politics and Belonging in peri-urban Santiago, Chile.
Professor Johnson said of his project, “This book project explores how the politics of autogestión have led to the emergence of democratic frameworks that contrast with liberal representational democracy in a globalized, neoliberal era. Frequently translated as “self-help”, contemporary scholarship has often distorted the concept of autogestión by analyzing community care practices as responses to neoliberal restructurings or products of neoliberal governmentality. In contrast, my research found that the concept of autogestión is more accurately understood as “lived democratic practice” and traces its origins to the 1960s “People Power” movements in North America and Europe, Latin American Third Worldism, and African decolonization. It draws from my 30 months of ethnographic and archival research which found that the transnational discourse of autogestión influenced the practices of democracy during Chile’s Social Explosion (October 2019), ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic (March 2020-present) and failed process to re-write the constitution written during the Pinochet Dictatorship (October 2022-December 2023). Through situating this Chilean case study within a global assemblage of social movements from the 1960s to the present, this project contributes to the broader anthropological theory of politics by scaling down its analysis to the level of everyday life to analyze where, when, and through whom democratic practices are exercised.”
Congratulations Nikola Johnson!
Lucia Buscemi graduated from Emory University in 2024 with a B.A. in Anthropology and a B.S. in Environmental Science. They are now working as a researcher in Nepal under the Fulbright US Student Researcher Program. Lucia’s project focuses on investigating the impacts of climate change on mountain tourism and traditional migration patterns in the Khumbu Valley (Everest region) in collaboration with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and Sagarmatha Next. Lucia’s interest in studying the effects of anthropogenic activities in the Nepalese Himalayas began with their experience as a Halle Institute Undergraduate Fellow at Emory.
During the summer of 2022, Lucia received a grant through Halle to conduct research for their Anthropology honors thesis in the Khumbu region. Their thesis research focused on the effects of the adventure tourism industry and climate change on the culture and livelihoods of residents of the Everest region, exploring how the autonomy of these communities is affected by and persists through recent anthropogenic changes. Lucia’s Fulbright research builds upon their prior experiences in Nepal, including an internship at Sagarmatha Next in Kathmandu during the summer of 2023, where they developed a sustainability certification program designed specifically for lodges and hotels in the Himalayas. Their upcoming Fulbright project is poised to offer valuable insights into the intricate interplay between climate change, tourism dynamics, and socio-economic patterns in the Himalayan region.
The Fulbright U.S. Student Program expands perspectives through academic and professional advancement and cross-cultural dialogue. Fulbright creates connections in a complex and changing world. In partnership with more than 140 countries worldwide, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers unparalleled opportunities in all academic disciplines to passionate and accomplished graduating college seniors, graduate students, and young professionals from all backgrounds. Program participants pursue graduate study, conduct research, or teach English abroad.
Congratulations Lucia!
EMORY ANTHROPOLOGY 