The Anthropology Department is pleased to announce our 2023 student award winners! For award descriptions and past winners, visit our Departmental Awards webpage. We are so proud of our many impressive students!
Marjorie Shostak Award for Excellence and Humanity in Ethnography:
Pamela Beniwal for her honors thesis “The Effect of Commercialization, Militarization, and Stigmatization of the Breast Cancer Awareness Movement on Breast Cancer Patients”, advised by Mel Konner.
Audrey Lu for her ANT 372W class project “The Lives of Charting: An Emergency Room Scribe’s Perspective (ANT 372W project)”, advised by Anna Grimshaw.
Alvaro Perez Daisson for his honors thesis “Race-related Health Disparities in Cuba in the Context of COVID-19”, advised by Mel Konner and Kristin Phillips.
Christopher Zeuthen for his honors thesis “Veteran Perspectives on Moral Injury”, advised by Mel Konner.
Photo from left to right: Professor Robert Paul, Christopher Zeuthen, Professor Melvin Konner, Audrey Lu, Alvaro Perez Daisson, and Pamela Beniwal.
Trevor E. Stokol Scholarship for Undergraduate Research:
1st Place: Eric Li
Maddie Hasson
Raya Islam (not pictured)
2023 Graduate Student Awards
The George Armelagos Award for Excellence in Teaching by a Graduate Student: AJ Jones, Caroline Owens
Emory College of Arts and Sciences is set to launch a new Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies this fall to advance and inspire research, scholarship, teaching and learning rooted in and related to Indigenous studies.
In conjunction with the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and through seven years of ongoing work by an interdisciplinary group involving dozens of faculty, students and staff including Dr. Craig Womack (emeritus, English), Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery (History), Associate Dean Beth Michel (OUA), Anthropology alumna Klamath Henry (C19), current Anthropology seniors Iliyah Bruffett (C23) and Sierra Talavera Brown (C23), and Anthropology faculty member Dr. Debra Vidali, Emory University is launching a Center for Native and Indigenous Studies in Fall 2023.
Four extraordinary Emory College juniors — Jojo Liu, Yingrong “Momo” Chen, Maddie Hasson, and Tamecka Marcheau-Miller — have won the Goldwater Scholarship, the nation’s top scholarship for undergraduates studying math, natural sciences and engineering. This year’s winners, who have made major contributions in labs and authored or co-authored papers on their research, all plan to pursue doctoral degrees in their respective fields. They join 45 previous Emory recipients of the award, which was endowed by Congress in 1986 to honor the late Sen. Barry Goldwater.
Maddie Hasson is an Anthropology major and rising senior honors student who also won the Trevor E. Stokol scholarship for her undergraduate research.
Congratulations Maddie and to everyone on outstanding academic achievements!
Read the full article and winners’ biographies here!
The Emory 1836 Project is a dynamic digital humanities website, created by students in the Reparative History at Emory course, that re-centers the university’s origins within the historical context of the forced deportation of the Muscogee and Cherokee peoples from Georgia and the national expansion of slavery. Student archival research, place-based study, ethnographic research, and community storytelling for the Emory 1836 Project investigate how the legacies of slavery and dispossession structured institutional culture and practices from the university’s founding through the present-day. This reparative history project recognizes the active presence and contributions of Black and Indigenous peoples throughout Emory University’s history. The project is a living document that will expand as other students add to it in future semesters.
Check out the website for stories, archival documents, interview clips, and maps of significant events in the history of Emory’s main campus and Oxford campus.
This project was a product of the HIST-488RW/AMST-489: Reparative History at Emory course taught in Spring 2023 by Dr. Michael Mortimer.
One of our undergraduate students, Klamath Henry, has her work featured in the wing for Art of the Americas within the Carlos Museum. A touch screen there connects to 3 / S I S T E R S / R E S I L I E N C Y / P R O J E C T which was developed in Fall 2017 as part of an project for an independent research course taught by Dr. Debra Vidali. This project presents photography, poetry, and ethnographic documentation of Tuscarora Nation resiliency and relations to land.
Please take the time to visit this outstanding project and congratulations to Klamath Henry!
The Lindo lab specializes in mapping little-explored human lineages of the Americas.
Previously published research found evidence of the tuberculosis bacterium in the skeletal material of 1,400-year-old Andean mummies, contradicting some theories that TB did not exist in South America until the arrival of Europeans 500 years ago.
The current paper provides the first evidence for a human immune-system response to TB in ancient Andeans and gives clues to when and how their genomes may have adapted to that exposure.
Among the strongest signals detected were for biomarkers that are switched on in modern humans during an active TB infection. The researchers modeled the timing of selection for several of the genes involved in the TB-response pathways. Although they were not as strong as for exposure to TB, some signals were also detected for biomarkers related to adaptation to hypoxia, or low levels of oxygen in the blood that result from living at high altitude.
“Human-pathogen co-evolution is an understudied area that has a huge bearing on modern-day public health,” Sophie Joseph says. “Understanding how pathogens and humans have been linked and affecting each other over time may give insights into novel treatments for any number of infectious diseases.”
In 2018, then UK Prime Minister Theresa May said, “Loneliness is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time,” and appointed the country’s first minister for loneliness. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called loneliness a “growing health epidemic,” stating that social isolation is “associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”
What do the following have in common? Rising rates of social anxiety and social withdrawal, alarming rates of suicide (up 51% among teenage girls in the U.S. in just a two-year period from 2019-2021, and up over 300% over a ten-year period), the increasing number of mass shootings, the epidemic of burnout in healthcare and other sectors, eating disorders. All too often, at the heart of each of these is a lack of social connection and the feeling of being loved, accepted, and understood. This is loneliness. Education is the most powerful tool we have for bringing about this change. Recent research in psychology and neuroscience shows that young children and even infants have a natural orientation towards kindness and helping over cruelty.
In 2002, armed Hindu mobs attacked Muslims in broad daylight in the west Indian state of Gujarat. The pogrom, which was widely seen over television, left over one thousand dead. In Composing Violence, Moyukh Chatterjee examines how highly visible political violence against minorities acts as a catalyst for radical changes in law, public culture, and power. He shows that, far from being quashed through its exposure by activists, media and politicians, state-sanctioned anti-Muslim violence set the stage for transforming India into a Hindu supremacist state. The state and civil society’s responses to the violence, Chatterjee contends, reveal the constitutive features of modern democracy in which riots and pogroms are techniques to produce a form of society based on a killable minority and a triumphant majority. Focusing on courtroom procedures, police archives, legal activism, and mainstream media coverage, Chatterjee theorizes violence as a form of governance that creates minority populations. By tracing the composition of anti-Muslim violence and the legal structures that transform that violence into the making of minorities and majorities, Chatterjee demonstrates that violence is intrinsic to liberal democracy.
“In this powerful book, Moyukh Chatterjee gives us a brief, elegant, and novel way of thinking about violence.” – Nancy Rose Hunt, author of Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo.
Available here! Use coupon code E23CHTTR to save 30% when you order from www.dukeupress.edu.
Chikako Ozawa-de Silva graduated from Sophia University in Tokyo before heading to Oxford University for a PhD in social and cultural anthropology. Research fellowships took her to Harvard and the University of Chicago before she joined Emory in 2003.
Her research focuses on the impacts of culture on well-being, including how people experience and respond to suffering. Ozawa-de Silva’s most recent book is titled “The Anatomy of Loneliness: Suicide, Social Connection, and the Search for Relational Meaning in Contemporary Japan.”
Published by the University of California Press, the book won the Society for East Asian Anthropology’s 2022 Francis Hsu Book Prize. The prize committee called the work “poignant, richly ethnographic and an exemplary instance of a book that really speaks beyond our field…Ozawa-de Silva writes about suicide and loneliness in Japan in ways that speak to wider global trends while giving us some hint at potentially better ways to live.”
“The Anatomy of Loneliness” also received the 2022 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing honorable mention, presented by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. “This book is a jarring, empathic, and even paradoxical diagnosis of emerging collective social structures that make people feel alone,” the prize committee wrote. “Along the way, readers are introduced to a brave and novel vision for what an inclusive society might mean.”
The Francis L. K. Hsu Prize is given to the book that was judged to have made the most significant contribution to the field of Anthropology of East Asia and is awarded by the American Anthropological Association’s Society for East Asian Anthropology. In The Anatomy of Loneliness, Ozawa-de Silva gracefully threads the needle of writing for a non-specialist audience while adding to conversations about loneliness, suicide, and social connection in the anthropology of East Asia. Moreover, she writes about the particularities of a social phenomenon in Japan in ways that speak to global experiences of loneliness as a part of the human condition, but one exacerbated by the structures of modern life and neoliberal policies. To do so, the book draws together current research in anthropology, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience/developmental biology, to theorize the anatomy of loneliness as both individual and social. The chapters chart Ozawa-de Silva’s research journey from a study of the dramatic increase in suicides in Japan beginning in 1998, to her discovery that a lack of social connection, loneliness, and a sense of meaning in life better reflected the stories she encountered than the assumed economic or mental health causes. In order to study suicide ethnographically, the book analyses first, second, and third person accounts seen through the phenomenon of suicide websites, the commodification of intimacy, the perceptions of college students, and the 2011 natural and nuclear disasters. The book ends with a timely focus on the communal loneliness of areas forgotten in post-Fukushima recovery initiatives and emerging examples of their resilience through community. Thus, Ozawa-de Silva writes about suicide and loneliness in Japan in ways that speak to wider global trends while giving us some hint at potentially better ways to live today. The committee also found Chikako’s book to be “poignant, richly ethnographic, and an exemplary instance of a book that really speaks beyond our field.”
The Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing is an annual juried book award by the American Anthropological Association’s Society for Humanistic Anthropology (SHA). The prize committee “seeks graceful, accessible ethnographic writing which deeply explores its subject and contributes in innovative and engaging ways to the genre(s) of ethnography and the field of humanistic (and/or post-humanistic) anthropology.” Chikako Ozawa-de Silva’s The Anatomy of Loneliness humanistically explores issues of human biology, and it analytically transforms loneliness from an individual state of being into a societal predicament. This book is a jarring, empathetic, and even paradoxical diagnosis of emerging collective social structures that make people feel alone. Along the way, readers are introduced to a brave and novel vision for what an inclusive society might mean. The book’s subject matter, from mental health to suicide, is challenging — but Ozawa-de Silva shows us how to rigorously write these topics in ways that cultivate inclusive engagement rather than reproduce the senses of alienation the book explores. The committee also felt that The Anatomy of Loneliness offers a truly unique, distinguished, and even experimental model of accessibility. This book is lucidly written. it is also a text that creatively and transparently brings the reader alongside the author in all her intellectual premises, all her conceptual inspirations, and every one of her turns of thought.
Watch Professor Ozawa-de Silva read the first 5-minutes of her book here.
EMORY ANTHROPOLOGY 