Commencement season each year marks the point when students prepare to move on from the temporary home they have made at the UW. This spring, UW Anthropology faculty, staff, and students are preparing to move from the department’s temporary home in Condon Hall, back to a newly renovated Denny Hall, where we invite you to come visit us this fall. As anthropologists steeped in a discipline built around the importance of field-based research, we understand that temporary displacements, while… Read more
On April 28, 2016, Professor Don Grayson delivered the University Faculty Lecture on the topic of “The Extinct Ice Age Mammals of North America,” to a packed house in Kane Hall. In it, he explored the myriad wonders of the extinct mammal fauna of Ice Age North America, questioning whether humans who coexisted with giant sloths, saber-tooth cats, dire wolves, mammoths, and other large mammals in ancient North America may have played a role in their extinction. Drawing on a broad variety of… Read more
Anthropology has been described as an endeavor to make “the strange familiar, and the familiar strange.” But as anthropology department faculty and staff learned on a recent outing, the latter part can apply to architectural renovation as well! In March we were treated to a unique opportunity to explore Denny Hall in the midst of its remodel, and see the most familiar of settings looking very strange indeed. Staff from BNBuilders helped us suit up and led us on a tour through the spaces we have… Read more
In December 2015, Sven Haakanson led an extraordinary month-long program at the Burke Museum which saw part of the main level foyer turned into a work space, smelling sweetly of red cedar, resonating with the rhythmic scraping of wood planes. Sven, students, Burke and UW staff, and curious museum visitors worked together to build a full sized Angyaaq, a twenty-five-foot open boat, in addition to eleven oars.
For over a thousand years, Sugpiat peoples across the Alaska Peninsula, Kodiak Island,… Read more
Anthropology graduate student Dan Grunspan recently made national news with his article, “Males Under-Estimate Academic Performance of Their Female Peers in Undergraduate Biology Classrooms.” Dan did not set out with the goal of demonstrating gender bias among college students. Rather, he was collecting and analyzing data on how students form study groups and how these impact their subsequent grades as part… Read more
The Department of Anthropology has welcomed two wonderful new staff to our community in the last year: academic counselor Morgan Hale, and program assistant Sasha Duttchoudhary. Both of them are 2013 graduates of UW, Morgan with a BA in Anthropology and Sasha with a BA in English. We asked them each to tell us about their journey here and the work they do. Here they are, in their own words:
Morgan Hale
What was your route to UW and to this… Read more
Peter Lape: Eastern Indonesia
Dr. Peter Lape, accompanied by archaeology graduate students Jenn Huff, Joss Whittaker, and Lauryl Zenobi, and recent PhD Emily Peterson, spent October and November 2015 on an archaeological field survey project on Seram Island and small offshore islets in eastern Indonesia. This collaboration between UW Anthropology and the Indonesian National Archaeology Research Center, is a multi-year project to investigate links between the emergence of agriculture, climate… Read more
The Department of Anthropology offers a special topics course taught by Professor Bettina Shell Duncan on health disparities in King County with a focus on the Somali refugee and immigrant communities. This is a service learning course, in which students are required to volunteer at a local organization focused on serving refugee and immigrant populations in King County. This type of experiential learning exposes students to unique perspectives while providing partner organizations with engaged… Read more
GRADUATE STUDENTS
Jeannie Bailey and some of her colleagues launched a podcast called The Bone Lab, which is funded by an education outreach grant provided by the American Association of Anatomists.
Dianne Baumann received a Summer Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to study Blackfoot in Browning, MT on the Blackfeet Reservation. She was also selected for this year’s Olson Fellowship.
Darren Byler received a one-quarter dissertation fellowship from the UW China Studies Program… Read more
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… Read more
We would like to take this opportunity to thank those generous donors who contributed to our efforts this past year. We believe that anthropology makes a world of difference and we want you to know that you make a world of difference to us!
David AgoadaAnn S. Anagnost, PhD and Mr. John BurgeRobert T. Boyd, PhDDr. Ruth G. BryanCurtis Wienker TrustWilliam S. Dancey, PhD and Ms. Kathleen Reilly DanceyLydia A. DeSantis, PhDLynda M. Emel, PhD and G. Carter Bentley, PhDEmersonLawrence… Read more