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
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.
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.
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.”
(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
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:
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.
Emory Anthropology alumnae Joanna Davidson ’07 and Dinah Hannaford ’14 joined forces to publish an edited volume, Opting Out: Women Messing with Marriage around the World (Rutgers University Press 2022). The book gathers ethnographic accounts of women moving away from conventional marital arrangements in countries all over the world. From Brazil to Botswana, the contributors examine the conditions that make this widespread – although locally variable – phenomenon possible and consider what the implications of opting out might be, both for marriage itself and for the anthropological study of it.
Postdoctoral Graduate, Scott Schnur collaborated with researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and other universities published an article in Nature Energy titled A Framework to Centre Justice in Energy. In the article, Scott and his colleagues discuss the important role of community engagement as a tool to promote equity in the green Energy Transition. They propose a framework that developers, planners, government officials, and other stakeholders can use in order to promote energy justice and inclusivity in the critical work that lies ahead in transforming our grid and combating climate change. Scott says, “The article continues my interest in exploring ways to promote equity and justice in relation to emergent climate futures.”
“Will Boose‘s article offers an ambitious, though still fragmented, history of motorcycle taxis in Peru. It offers three central arguments. First, it highlights that motorcycle taxi drivers have played a fundamental role in the production of urban space. Second, it argues that state, elite, and popular discourses about “informality” and the “modern city” stigmatize motorcycle taxi drivers in ways that are classist and racialized, targeting them for strict policing. Finally, it suggests that if we think with motorcycle taxi drivers and the materiality of motorcycle taxis, we can reveal the contradictions inherent to the “formal”-“informal”, and “modern”-“non-modern” binaries and thus more lucidly analyze urban space and relations.”
Histórica, based in Peru, is aimed at researchers and a specialized public and publishes works evaluated by peers that constitute an original contribution to the knowledge of Peruvian, Andean, and Amazonian history, as well as Latin American history and global history directly related to the history of the Andean region. In addition to works on history and ethnohistory, the journal includes works on art history, historical anthropology, historical linguistics, historical geography, historical demography, memory studies, and every other discipline, subdiscipline, and field of study in the Humanities and Sciences.
EMORY ANTHROPOLOGY 