Student | Alumni News 2013

Submitted by Arts & Sciences Web Team on

Recent Graduates: New Jobs and Post-Docs

Alejandro Ceron (sociocultural), who will defend his dissertation this spring, has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Denver.

David H. Giles (sociocultural), who will defend his dissertation this spring, has accepted a visiting faculty position in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Damarys Espinoza (sociocultural), who will defend her dissertation this spring, was offered a post doctoral fellowship at Ohio State University, Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Yu Huang (PhD 2012) was hired as an Assistant Professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Trang X. Ta (PhD 2011) is an assistant professor in Medical Anthropology at Australian National University and she also is the recipient of a Fulbright research grant with the University of Hong Kong.

Amanda Taylor (PhD 2012) is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma.

Hsun-Hui Tseng (PhD 2012) is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University in New York City.

 Graduate Students: Grants, Fellowships and Other Awards

Will Brown received department pilot research funding to evaluate the presence and detectability of gastrointestinal parasite eggs that are likely to be preserved in human-deposited sediments (particularly midden deposits) from the Kodiak Archipelago in the Gulf of Alaska. This is a first step in his evaluation of the influence of infectious disease burdens, and changes therein, on past population growth in Kodiak.

Darren Byler received a Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship for 2012-13.

Coleen Carrigan received an American Association of University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellowship.

Benjamin Chabot-Hanowell received a 2012 Fulbright Study Research Scholarship.

Anna Cohen received department funding for pilot research on Purépecha (Tarascan) political regime development in Postclassic Mesoamerica (1000-1520 CE). She will examine how the daily activities of people living in a political core region changed as new power fluctuated. Excavation data from Angamuco, a newly discovered ancient city in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Michoacán, will help her to compare changes in artifact production and consumption before, during, and after Purépecha polity formation.

Tara Hayes Constant was awarded a training fellowship in the Biobehavioral Cancer Prevention and Control Training Program (BCPT), coordinated by the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The mission of the Biobehavioral Cancer Prevention and Control Program is to train public health researchers, health services researchers, and health policy analysts in biobehavioral and outcomes research as applied to cancer prevention and control.

Stephanie Cruz is a BioFutures Summer Research Consortium Fellow. She is investigating the emerging market for cadavers and simulation mannequins in biomedical research. She is specifically interested in how research ethics are applied in new fields where the definition of "the human subject" is still being deliberated.

Damarys Espinoza received a Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy teaching fellowship for 2012-13 and an American Association of University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellowship.

David Giles received a Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy teaching fellowship for 2012-13.

Marlaine Gray received MAGH (Medical Anthropology and Global Health) pilot funding to study how patient art programming is integrated into hospitals as part of medical care. The funds allowed her to travel to Georgetown University’s Medical Center Lombardi Cancer Center, where a large wing of the hospital houses an art therapy program for in- and out-patient children. As part of her research, she interviewed the art therapist who founded this project, and toured the facility.  

Department pilot funding enabled Joshua Griffin (sociocultural) to visit the Iñupiaq community of Kivalina in Northwest Alaska, a focal point of his dissertation on climate justice. Griff also visited the archives at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, where he procured material about the environmental history of Kivalina. While in Alaska, he presented a paper at the symposium "Environment, Culture and Place in a Rapidly Changing North," organized by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment and held at the University of Alaska Southeast.

Griff also received a 2012 “Small Grant for Collaborative Problem Solving” from the Anthropology and Environment section of AAA. It is for his proposal:  "Towards an Environmental History of Kivalina, Alaska: A Collaborative Ethnography of Place, in Support of Climate-Induced Relocation." Fieldwork will be carried out in summer or fall of 2013.

Ava Holliday received MAGH pilot research funding for her project exploring how outdoor education programs use the wilderness as a healing space, and wilderness-related activities (such as hiking, climbing, and mountaineering) as healing practices. Approaching this from the perspective of the wilderness being a racialized space, this work allows her to research how wilderness healing may be a racialized concept and practice.

Gladys Jian received a Project for Interdisciplinary Pedagogy teaching fellowship for 2013-14. 

The UW Garbology Project, founded by anthropology graduate student Jack Johnson (archaeology), has completed its second full season of research on the UW campus. The project has also received a small grant from the UW Campus Sustainability Fund to support its upcoming spring efforts, and is currently seeking volunteers.

Amy Jordan received a 2012-13 Graduate School Presidential Dissertation Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Social Professions.

Lisbeth Louderback was awarded the 2012 American Quaternary Association Denise M. Gaudreau Award and a 2012 National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant.

Jessica Lozano received a Fritz Graduate Fellowship for International Research and Study which she used to conduct pilot research in communities linking the rural villages of the Los Altos Sur region of Jalisco, Mexico with the urban cities of Pittsburg and Los Angeles, California. Her research seeks to identify the ways in which transnational networks are used as social capital by transborder migrants in order to transcend anti-immigrant policies and environments that compromise their access to health care.

Claudia Serrato whose work connects midwifery histories, indigenous womb-ecologies, the politics of food and reproductive health care, mothering, and nutrition/food ways among indigenous (Mesoamerican) women with taste memories in the Los Angeles basin has received a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship.

Shanna Scherbinske received a Dissertation Proposal
Development Fellowship (DPDF) from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) for her project "Mapping Transnational Communities: Somali Communities in Kenya and Seattle."

Kayla Wopschall received an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for her dissertation entitled "Pygmy Hippos of Cyprus and an Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding Human Colonization and Large Mammal Extinction."

Anna Zogas received MAGH Pilot Research funding and a student scholarship from the Harlan Hahn Endowment Fund of the UW Disability Studies Program. The funding supports preliminary research on mild traumatic brain injury (mild TBI) investigating how clinical research, treatment, and disability compensation intersect to make mild TBI visible as a medical and social problem in the U.S. military healthcare system.

 

Graduate Student: Publications

Jen Carroll published an article, “Evidence Based Medicine and the Construction of Moral Agency in Ukraine,” in CARGO: Journal for Cultural and Social Anthropology, published by the Czech Association for Social Anthropology. The article is based on research she conducted in 2010 and 2012.

 Department Awards

Amanda Taylor and Lisbeth Louderback are this year’s winners of the Yeager Award for Scholarly Excellence papers. Amanda’s paper—Taylor, Amanda K., Stein Julie K., and Jolivette, Stephanie A. (2011) “Big Sites, Small Sites, and Coastal Settlement Patterns in the San Juan Islands, Washington, USA”—appeared in the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology 6(2): 287-313. Lisbeth’s paper—Louderback, L.A., Grayson, D.K., Llobera, M. (2011) “Holocene Climates and Human Population Densities in the Great Basin, Western USA”—appeared in The Holocene 21(2): 366-373.

Claudia Serrato is the 2012-13 Baldwin Scholar.

Erik Gjesfjeld is the UW Anthropology 2012 Niles Fellow.

Joshua Griffin is the 2012-13 James Fellow.

 Mary Gates Scholarships for Undergraduates

Amanda Cortez (Devon Peña, adviser)—Amanda’s research will focus on how we think of ourselves as human beings in relation to other-than-human primates. For example, what do the spaces we create at zoos say about us as human beings, and about our capacity for cruelty or tenderness toward our relatives? And what are the implications of this for animal rights? To carry out this cross-cultural study, Amanda will travel to Sierra Leone to look at this issue in West Africa, and then compare her results with data she finds at various sites in the Seattle area.

Sanya Dhermy (Holly Barker, adviser)—Sanya will conduct oral history research with whistleblowers from the Hanford facility in Washington.  

Lena Easton-Calabria (Michael Pèrez, adviser)—Lena’s research project is an ethno-botanical study of knowledge about local plants and their uses among the Monte Salvado (Ese’eja) indigenous communities of Peru.

Sam Eglin (James Pfeiffer, adviser)—Sam will interview healthcare workers in Sierra Leone about how they cope with the health workforce shortage in a country that is still rebuilding from its recent armed conflict.

Jennifer Luong (Jim Green, adviser)—Jennifer is exploring the role that health care plays in a state prison facility through the perspectives of health care staff, correctional staff, and inmates.

Haley Millett (Devon Peña, adviser)—Haley’s research will focus on food justice in Kyakitanga village in the Mubende district of central Uganda. She will explore the potential role of agroecological knowledge in the village’s self-definition of its future food system.

 Alumni: Awards, Publications and Research

Dale Croes (BA 1969), a wet site archaeologist who began work at the Ozette site and then directed Hoko, Qwu?gwes and Sunken Village, received the Peace and Friendship Award in 2012 through the Washington State Historical Society Museum with the Squaxin Tribe.

study led by Professor Kristen Hawkes (PhD 1976), chair of the anthropology department at the University of Utah, provides new mathematical support for the “grandmother hypothesis,” a theory that humans evolved longer adult lifespans than apes because grandmothers helped feed their grandchildren.

Archaeologists Terry Hunt (PhD 1989) and Carl Lipo (PhD 2000) offer daring new theories on the statues of Easter Island in their bookThe Statues that Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island(Free Press, 2011) explores the techniques used by Easter Islanders to move the massive stone statues. Their work also resulted in a film by National Geographic, as well as stories in the Guardian and Fox News.

Nina Jablonski (PhD 1981) recently published Living Color: The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color (U. California Press, 2012), which is the first book to investigate the social history of skin color from prehistory to the present, showing how our body’s most visible trait influences our social interactions in profound and complex ways.

Harriet Phinney (PhD 2003), a faculty member at Seattle University, was featured in a top-of-the-site story in the New York Times about Vietnamese women who choose to be single mothers. 

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