Department announcements
The Anthropology Research Museum is committed to returning Native American ancestors and their belongings to their homes and complying with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). To learn more or request consultation, please visit the University's NAGPRA webpage.
University of Nevada, Reno anthropology students and faculty are busy presenting and publishing their work, organizing and hosting public lectures by distinguished visitors, and bringing positive attention to the department. Here are just a few accomplishments and events.
April 2023
Congratulations to the following individuals for completing our doctoral program this spring: Dr. Kristen Broehl; Dr. Laresa Dern; Dr. Tatiana Vlemincq-Mendieta; and Dr. Chris Wolf.
Congratulations to Ashley Baeza and Dominic Tullo for completing our Master’s program this spring.
Recent PhD graduate Dr. Kristen Broehl has accepted an Assistant Teaching Professor position at Emory University.
Recent PhD graduate Chris Wolf has accepted an Assistant Professor position at Eastern Carolina University.
Recent PhD graduate Elaine Chu has accepted an Assistant Professor position at Texas State University.
PhD students Leah Auchter, Zara Browne, Emily Smith, and Nandar Yukyi have received Bilinski Fellowships.
PhD student Kendra Isable won Best Student Poster Presentation at the Paleopathology Association Conference.
PhD student Kendra Isable earned first place in the PhD category of UNR's 3MT competition for her presentation Bones Tell Tales: Giving a Voice to the Historically Silenced.
PhD student Briana New won the American Association of Biological Anthropologists’ Outstanding Student Presentation Award.
Congratulations to the following individuals for receiving Anthropology Department awards this spring: Minkyeong Kim (Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant); Audrey Armstrong (Promise Award); Shelby Saper (Splatt Award); Dr. Elaine Chu (McCandless Award); and Dr. Stephanie Cole (McCandless Award).
Ph.D. student John Ostermiller's research project Between Piety and Popularity: Cultural Code-Switching and Muslim Migrant Communities in Japan" has been selected for the KCC-Japan Education Exchange Graduate Fellowship Award for 2023-2024.
PhD student Isabelle Guerrero was awarded a 2023 Joint NAA/Am-Arcs Student Research Grant for her PhD research project Tunna' Nosi' Kaiva' Gwaa: Investigating Native Persistence in the Historic American West.
Shelby Saper and Jackson Mueller both won awards for their presentations at the Nevada Archaeological Association's Annual meeting. Shelby won for her poster Current Understandings of Crescents in California and the Great Basin. Jackson won for his 3-minute paper Back to the Stone Age: The Journey of an Errant Historical Archaeologist.
Dr. Sarah Cowie received the CLA’s Graduate Advising Award.
Dr. Erin Stiles named Runner-Up for the Alan Bible Excellence in Teaching Award.
March 2023
Erica Bradley has received a GSA Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award.
Alana Walls, Audrey Andrews, Emily Smith, Ginelle Kocher, and Isabelle Guerrero have received GSA Research, Travel, & Material Grants.
Kendra Isable and Briana New have received GSA Outstanding Domestic Graduate Student Awards.
Anthropology Ph.D. students Leah Auchter, Zara Browne, Emily Smith, and Nandar Yukyi have received prestigious Bilinksi Fellowships.
Ph.D. student John Ostermiller has been designated an alternate for Fulbright Japan and has been awarded a prestigious Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for his dissertation project called Between Piety and Popularity: Cultural Code-Switching and Muslim Migrant Communities in Japan.
Ph.D. student Isabelle Guerrero was selected to receive a 2023 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship for her project entitled Historic Archaeology at Tunna’ Nosi’ Kaiva’ Gwaa: Employing Collaborative Indigenous Methodologies.
The Society for California Archaeology conference was March 17-19 and UNR was well-represented again. Ph.D. student Alexandria Firenzi won the Orphaned Collections Award for her project: Dietary Variation, Population Aggregation, and Foraging Strategies on Santa Rosa Island During the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. UNR Anthropology won the Society for California Archaeology Ethics Bowl. Our team was made up of undergraduates and graduate students, including Summer Hagerty, Nick Reul, Natalie Marud, Alexandria Firenzi, Shelby Saper, and Alex Kulp.
Ph.D. student Kendra Isable was selected as a finalist in UNR's 3MT competition! Her presentation is titled, Bones Tell Tales: Giving a Voice to the Historically Silenced.
Ph.D. students Emily Smith and Nandar Yukyi both received the Ozmen Institute for Global Studies Graduate Student Research Grants.
Ph.D. Student Jeremy McFarland received a substantial grant from Far Western Foundation to conduct his research titled: Radiocarbon Dating of Legacy Museum Collections and Selective Field Sampling from the King Range National Conservation Area.
Alana Walls, a Ph.D. student in Anthropology and MA student in Gender, Race, and Identity, has been selected to participate in the prestigious NSF-Funded Cultural Anthropology Methods Program during Spring 2023. The program brings together faculty and graduate students from across the country to support innovation in research design, data collection, and analysis, with a particular focus on decolonizing, Indigenous, and participatory methods.
Ph.D. Student Zara Browne won first prize in the student paper competition at the annual meeting of SWAA, the Southwestern Anthropological Association. Zara’s paper title was Hopping the Broom: The Role of Elder Authority in Irish Traveler Marriages.
Foundation Professor Deborah A. Boehm and a group of current and former UNR students—Esmeralda Salas, Margarita Salas-Crespo, and Alana Walls—have been awarded a Mellon/ACLS Scholars and Society Fellowship Collaborative Reflections Grant to highlight graduate training in the publicly engaged humanities. The grant supports a co-authored piece that will be published in Preparing Community-Engaged Scholars: A Toolkit, as well as a series of events created in partnership with local community organizations.
An opinion piece about U.S. immigration detention written by Foundation Professor Deborah A. Boehm (Anthropology and Gender, Race, and Identity) was recently published in The Sacramento Bee. The commentary came out of collaborative work with several organizations in Nevada, including Arriba Las Vegas Worker Center, PLAN-Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada, and the UNLV School of Law Immigration Clinic.
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) awarded Associate Professor Sarah Cowie a Kavli Fellowship to present her research and co-organize a session for the NAS’s 2022 Japanese-American-German Frontiers of Science (JAGFoS) symposium, for which she also gave the symposium’s closing talk. The NAS again awarded her with a Kavli Fellowship to present her research and also invited her to be the American Chair for their 2023 JAGFOS symposium in Dresden, Germany.
February 2023
Dr. Fulera Issaka-Toure (Bayreuth University, Germany) visited our department during the month of March. Dr. Issaka-Toure is an expert on Islamic legal practice in West Africa and will be working with our own Dr. Erin Stiles.
Dr. Fatima Essop (Harvard University) visited our department from March 6-9. Dr. Essop is an expert on Islamic legal practice in South Africa.
On March 7 from 4:30-5:30 p.m., Dr. Essop and Dr. Issaka-Toure gave a Hilliard-sponsored lecture titled “Islam, Gender, and Legal Pluralism in Ghana and South Africa.”
Dr. Richard Scott has received an Ozmen Institute for Global Studies Grant to conduct research in Argentina this coming summer.
Dr. Richard Scott and UNR graduate students Laresa Dern, Arielle Pastore, and Mackenzie Sullivan have published an article titled “World Variation in Three-rooted Lower Second Molars and Implications for the Hominin Fossil Record” in the Journal of Human Evolution.
Graduate students Emily Smith and Nandar Yukyi have both received Ozmen Institute for Global Studies Graduate Student Research Grants.
Ph.D. candidate Chris Wolfe is one of just 15 participants invited to a Wenner-Gren Foundation workshop titled “New approaches to studying sub-adult hominins in the fossil record.”
Ph.D. student Alana Walls has been accepted as a Fellow in the NSF-funded Cultural Anthropology Methods Program (CAMP).
