Staff
John Cady, anthropology department fiscal coordinator for the last 16 years, has accepted a new position in the Dean’s Office to help with the coming transition to Workday Financials. UW has determined Workday Financials will provide the best available platform to support its business objectives for Finance Transformation.
After 20 years with the Department of Anthropology and some 30 years at the University of Washington, Michael Caputi will be retiring at the end of June 2021.
Faculty
Sareeta Amrute has been awarded a Russell Sage Fellowship for 2021-22, to investigate how Asian Americans and Asian immigrant community organizations build solidarity both within their groups and with other communities involved in racial and social justice organizing.
In 2020-21, Radhika Govindrajan was a Fulbright Nehru Fellow and also a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, with research focusing on “More-Than-Human Democracy in Himalayan India,” investigating the intersections of legal judgements and long-standing religious, cultural, and activist traditions that view nonhumans as social persons.
Jenna Grant was awarded a UW Population Health Initiative COVID-19 population health equity research grant. The project is a collaboration with Thyda Ros of the Khmer Community of Seattle-King County and Kunteang Som Haskins, UW Master of Public Health student in Community Oriented Public Health Practice. The project seeks to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the daily lives of Khmer elders and youth in King County, working from a conceptualization of health in which community belonging and generational interdependence are central.
The UW Southeast Asia Center was awarded a $1 million grant from the Luce Foundation's LuceSEA Initiative to explore forms of empiricism, art, pedagogy, and activism as archive-based responses to contemporary authoritarianisms in Southeast Asia and the U.S. The project, "Tracing Authoritarianism: Linking Southeast Asia with Southeast Asian America through Archives, Language, and Pedagogy," involves Department of Anthropology faculty Celia Lowe (PI) and Jenna Grant (Co-PI), together with faculty in UW Libraries, American Ethnic Studies, History, and the Burke Museum, and collaborators in Cambodia, Myanmar, and the Philippines. Work with American and Southeast Asian partners in museum and archival collections will connect heritage communities to their homelands and histories and offer opportunities for empowerment and recovery from acts of violence and appropriation.
Melanie Martin received a 2020 NSF RAPID Collaborative Grant with Co-PIs Dan Eisenberg (UW Anthropology) and Eleanor Brindle (UW Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology). The study, conducted in collaboration with clinical researchers, epidemiologists, and anthropologists at four other institutions, is collecting survey and biological data from COVID-19 infected breastfeeding mothers and healthy controls.
Ben Marwick was named director of the new Data Science minor at the University of Washington.