Faculty | Staff News 2016

Submitted by Catherine M. Zeigler on

Sareeta Amrute was awarded a Wenner-Gren Postdoctoral Fellowship to support the final stages of work on her first book, Encoding Race, Encoding Class: Indian IT Workers in Berlin, which will be published by Duke University Press later this year.

Holly M. Barker was honored as the recipient of the UW Women's Center "Woman of Courage 2016" award. She is Co-PI on a grant “Unmapping Global Studies: Oceania, Global Indigeneities and the Transformation of Area Studies,” which includes efforts to develop a minor in Oceanic and Pacific Islander Studies at UW. She delivered the Distinguished Lecture for the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania in 2015, which will soon be published.

Jean Dennison’s book Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation, was recently cited at length in an Osage Nation Supreme Court Decision. The 2016 Decision looked to the history of the Osage Nation, including the writing of the 2006 Osage Nation Constitution, to set a distinct Osage precedent for how the Congressional and Executive branches would divide their authorities.

Steve Goodreau has been awarded a contract from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), on adolescent PrEP. PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) is a pill that can prevent HIV infection, when taken once a day by those who are HIV-negative but at risk of infection. PrEP is currently approved for adult use in the US, and Washington State is one of three states with a program to cover the costs of PrEP for all people at high risk for HIV acquisition. Approval of PrEP for those under 18, possibly without requiring parental consent, is under consideration. Professor Goodreau and his team are tasked to identify the likely impact of PrEP among adolescents if it were made widely available under different scenarios, to help the CDC in their recommendations.

Donald K. Grayson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Founded in 1780 "to cultivate every art and science which may tend to interest, honor, dignity and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people," the AAA&S has counted among its members such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, John F. Kennedy, Aaron Copeland, Martin Luther King Jr, Jonas Salk, Akira Kurosawa, and many others. In April, Professor Grayson delivered the University Faculty Lecture on “The Extinct Ice Age Mammals of North America” (please see the AnthropoLog story here)

Sven Haakanson developed a traveling exhibit, Living Alaska, that is now traveling around Alaska, and completed two catalogues: one to accompany the exhibit and another on Alaskan artists titled Inspiring Alaska. He has presented, researched and consulted this year on programs in Argentina, Germany, Alaska, Washington D.C., New Mexico, New York, Arizona, and Nevada.

Stevan Harrell was nominated for the Marsha L. Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. Current and former graduate students far and wide contributed heartfelt letters to this effort.

Kathleen O’Connor was elected to the rank of Fellow in the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, “for distinguished contributions at the interface of anthropology, demography, and endocrinology, particularly in the areas of hormones and behavior and reproduction across the life span."

Michael Vicente Pérez, who has won a competitive fellowship from the American Council of Oriental Research, which will allow him to spend Fall Quarter 2016 in Jordan pursuing research on a community of Palestinian refugees there. This work will contribute to a class that Professor Pérez is developing to add to our curriculum on displacement/migration, slated to be taught next winter, 2017. He was a finalist for this year’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Janelle Taylor was awarded the 2015 Graduate Student Mentoring Award, by the Medical Anthropology Students Association, of the Society for Medical Anthropology.

Sasha Welland has won a place in the year-long Society of Scholars program of the Simpson Center for the Humanities in 2016-17, which will support work on her new project, Cancer Aesthetics: Feminist Manifesto on the Meantime of Life and Death.

Alison Wylie delivered the 2016 Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities, on the topic “What Knowers Know Well: Why Feminism Matters to Archaeology,” questioning some scholars’ conviction that research is only credible if it is “value free” and arguing that the critical insights of feminism are a crucial resource for empirical research in any field.

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