FACULTY
Sareeta Amrute has been named Director of Research at Data and Society. Her appointment began in January 2019.
Holly Barker and Luke Tornabene (UW Biology) received a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for International Research Experience for Students (IRES). The grant provides scholarships to take students to American Samoa, the Marshall Islands, and Tonga over the next three years to highlight Indigenous Oceanic traditions in the STEM fields and to work with local Pacific Islander students in the greater Seattle area to see their cultural ways of knowing and values reflected in STEM practices. Additionally, Holly received a $10,000 grant from 4Culture for projects that build relationships between the Marshallese community and civic institutions (schools, healthcare facilities, museums, libraries).
Anthropology professors Rachel Chapman and James Pfeiffer received a grant from Population Health Initiative and follows from Rachel's Royalty Research Grant titled, "Birthing Diversity in Seattle: Modelling Innovative Perinatal Care at the Intersection of Risks, Resources and Resilience to Improve Maternal/Infant Outcomes in Underserved Urban Communities.” They are also collaborating on a new research and advocacy project titled, ‘Mama Ammaan (Safe Mother) Project: African Mother to Mother Antenatal Assistance Network (AMMAAN).”
The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced $14.8 million in new grants to support 253 humanities projects nationwide. María Elena García — Associate Professor in Comparative History of Ideas and Adjunct Professor in Anthropology — has been awarded a grant to complete, Gastro-Politics, Race, and Species in Peru, a book-length study about the recent culinary boom in Peru that has made Lima one of the top food destinations in the world.
Associate Professor Radhika Govindrajan published her new book, Animal Intimacies: Interspecies Relatedness in India's Central Himalayas (University of Chicago Press), that mobilizes the theme of “interspecies relatedness” to explore a variety of human/non-human animal encounters in contemporary India.
Jenna Grant was awarded a $10,000 Whiting Foundation Seed Grant, for a project that uses the unique documents of the Becker collection as prompts, provocations and raw materials for storytelling and artistic production by communities affected by the Khmer Rouge. Jenna will also be a fellow in the Simpson Center Society of Scholars for 2019-20
Ben Marwick was named a 2019-20 TIER Fellow. Fellows are tasked to incorporate transparency and reproducibility in their own teaching and/or research advising, and to engage in the development and/or dissemination of methods for conducting or teaching transparent research. Marwick also was appointed to the advisory board of the United Kingdom Reproducibility Network, and received a National Geographic Society Explorers Grant to conduct Palaeolithic archaeology excavations in Myanmar, and a Wenner-Gren grant to organise a symposium of East and Southeast Asian Palaeolithic archaeology in Vietnam..
Mexican-Origin, a co-edited book by Devon Peña and Gabe Valle (PhD 2016) was awarded Outstanding Academic Title designation by Choice Reviews in Academic Publishing. The list this year includes 455 titles out of more than 4800 reviewed and more than 21,000 titles submitted to Choice during this period. Additionally, the Association for the Study of Food and Society awarded the same book "Best Edited Volume 2018" Prize.
Marieke van Eijk was elected as the co-chair of the Society of Medical Anthropology’s Special Interest Group RUSH in January 2019. RUSH is an anthropology group dedicated to fostering research and collaboration on contemporary issues related to health and biomedical healthcare in the United States. They organize webinars, student-oriented career development events, plus academic panels that bring together academics and professionals who critically engage with health policy and practice in the United States. van Eijk is also collaborating with Dr. Bianca Frogner and other researchers at the UW Center for Health Workforce Studies (CHWS) on research grant projects that help train the health workforce to reduce health disparities. “The Anthropology of Boring Things” was launched on Second Spear, the blog of Medical Anthropology Quarterly. The special issue, curated by van Eijk, features various essays on the role of presumably boring things in health care.