Department of Anthropology

CUA Anthropology Department Student News

 students' projects | news of alumni |  E-ANNOUNCEMENTS (internships, grants & fellowships) | events

Anthropology Graduates in 2009

After they graduate...  Nicole Leonard (l) plans to work as an archaeologist in cultural heritage management, Irene Kelly (c) is interning at the International Conservation Caucus and plans to work in international development, Michael Stedman (r) is going to law school and plans to pursue a career in Cultural Heritage law.  Max Iping-Petterson finished in December 2008 and left for graduate school in The Netherlands.

Graduate Students:
Pallavi Kakade (MA), Anne Ballenger (PhD, Diss: "Self-Care among Older Catholic Women in a Historic Suburb Community Parish"), Patricia Alexander (MA), Viviana Christian (PhD, Diss: "Who are We? Cultural Identity among Latino College Students in Northern Virginia")

Anthropology Graduates in 2008

After they Graduate... Cara McGrath (left) will intern in forensic anthropology and hopes to work at the FBI or the Smithsonian. Rebecca Spence has a job with a global research and consulting firm. Kathleen Gallagher* (graduating Summa Cum Laude) plans to spend the next year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Katie Beatty (graduating Magna Cum Laude) is going to Florence for post-bac art study with Studio Art Centers International. Jacqueline Nemeth (not pictured) will go to New York for an MSW.

*elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Congratulations, Kathleen!

Anthropology Graduates in 2007

Undergraduate

• Rachel Dudek, BA
• Jennifer Polidora, BA

Graduate Students

• Karl Austin, MA
• Marta S. Barkell, PhD  Illness Experience Among Salvadoran Women Immigrants
• Valerie Dandar, MA  Embracing America: Citizenship Education as an Approach to Inclusiveness
• Rev. Henryk Gaska, PhD (October 2006). Constructing Ava Guarani Ethnic Identity: The Emergence of Indian Organization
• Maria C. Sanchez Gonzalez, PhD  Gender and natural resources: Maya women and the Mexican Agrarian Reform
• Symantha A. Holben, PhD (January 2007). Expanding the Focus of Water Management: An Investigation of Cooperative Irrigation in Sacaba (Cochabama), Bolivia
• Christopher H. Varhola, PhD  Environmental values, religion, and conservation ethics: The Saadani region of coastal Tanzania.
   

Anthropology Graduates in 2006

Anthropology BAs in 2006 (and their theses):

• Lauren C. Long - Minding the Gap: Deconstructing Discourses of 20-Something Advice-Seekers
• Ryan Hehman - Land is Life: The Deep Play of Land Occupations and the Construction of Identity for Brazil's Landless Farmers
• Kristy Swartz - Identity Construction and Deep Play through Tourism in Salem, MA
• Rebecca Winters - Sexuality and Gender: Rethinking Sex-Trafficking in Contemporary Discourses
• Jessica Sinclair - Opting for Alternatives: An Examination of Involvement with Alternative Medicine
• Arielle Molino - Doubting Darwin:The Intelligent Design Movement as a Cultural Phenomenon
• Brian Michael - The Professionalization of Sports
• Ellen Flatley - From Weird to Wired: The Modern Irish State and Identity
• Megan Biggins - Behind the Veil of Americanism: The Identity of Muslim Americans

Graduate Students:

• Sarah Lindemann - MA in May 2006
• Anne Marie Stallings - PhD in January 2006. Dissertation - Culture, History, and Property Rights in the Emergence of Groundwater Irrigation: Cochabamba, Bolivia.

   

Anthropology Graduates in 2005

BA:

• Tiffany Malig (Senior Thesis - From Agora to Mall of America: The Evolution of Material Culture and Comsumption Studies)
• Ellen Manning (Senior Thesis - From Samurai Swords to Sugarcane to Strikeouts: Cultural Meanings Embedded through Baseball)
• Jordan Yanoshik (Senior Thesis- Beer-Drinking Cultures of North and South America)

PhD:

• Rev. Joseph Tamba Philip Kamanda (Dissertation - I am because we are: shaping a transnational community among Sierra Leonean transmigrants in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area)
  
   

Anthropology Graduates in 2004

BA:

• Daphne C. Dador*
• Meghann E. G. McBeath*
• James E. Miller, Jr.*
• Christopher E. Neubauer*
• Ha-Ri Kang (August graduation)

MA:

• John P. Mullen
• Juergen Franz

*Elected to Pi Gamma Mu , International Honor Society in Social Science

Anthropology Graduates in 2003

• James Ryan Welsh, BA
  Senior Thesis: "Sacrifice and Its Role in the Social Organization of the Inca Empire"

• Tammy Bryant, MA
  Thesis: "Way Beyond the Big House: A Model for the Location of Late 18th to Early 19th Century African-American Field Slave Sites in the Northern Virginia Piedmont"

• Olga Garcia Harper, PhD
  Dissertation: "Perceptions of a Riverine Ecosystem of Leon Province in Northwestern Spain: Cultural Models of Three Generations of Leonese Fishermen"

• Daniel Arthur Koski-Karell, PhD
  Dissertation: "Prehistoric Northern Haiti: Settlement in Diachronic Ecological Context"

• Alessandra Sartori-McCormack, PhD
  Dissertation: "Cecina de Leon: The Production, Comsumption, and Cultural Representation of a Spanish Traditional Food in a Global Economy"

• Paul Asante Appiah, PhD
  Dissertation: "Lineage and Consumption in the Context of Ghana's Structural Adjustment Program: The Miners of Ghana Manganese Company, Nauta, Ghana"

• Heather Anne Wholey, PhD
  Dissertation: "Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Demography: An Estimation and Comparative Assessment for the Piedmont Virginia Archaic"

Students' Projects & Summer Work

• Theresa Ohle ('12) interned for the Bergen County Sheriff in New Jersey, where she was assigned to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation.
• Victoria Carruthers ('10) worked at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum Services Center on a project analyzing 12,000 year old bones of very early domesticated animals.
• Liz Kuebler ('10) was a policy & external relations intern at Women for Women International, an international development and humanitarian aid NGO that works to empower women survivors of war.
• Michael Prescott ('10) spent his summer researching wound closure procedures for Covidien, a global corporation that manufactures and distributes medical devices.
• Claire Weatherall ('10) excavated human remains at an archaeological site in Poland.

• Victoria Carruthers ('10) had an internship at the Smithsonian, where she worked on analysis of metal and pottery manufacturing at Tel Jemmeh, a Bronze Age site, for her Senior Option paper.

• Liz Kuebler ('10) worked at Homeland Security's office of Citizenship & Immigration Service, which verifies immigration status of people applying for government benefits and where she says she "became familiar with various issues regarding immigration and developed a strong interest in refugee and asylum issues."

• Irene Kelly ('09) worked at the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center. She went to Greece in Fall '08 for an archaeology class that took place on the Acropolis, and traveled to Istanbul, Cairo and Crete.
• Nicole Leonard ('09) went to New Mexico to work on the Mogollon Prehistoric Landscape Project, digging 13th-14th sites, learning ceramic analysis, and sifting "lots of animal bones, potsherds, lithics."
• Patricia Alexander ('09 MA) was a volunteer overseer with the University of North Carolina's MOCHE Project at Cerro Leon Peru, and studied at the Academia Colonial in Antigua, Guatemala. In Fall 2008, she's a curatorial intern for the Pre-Columbian Department at Dumbarton Oaks. 

• Eric Schmidt is studying the guinea pig remains from the Conchopata site in Peru.
• Juergen Franz has begun his project on the waterfront in Dorchester County, MD.
• Jeff Splitstoser is working on his dissertation on ancient Peruvian weaving.
• Barbara Wolff is writing her dissertation based on research in Peru.
• Yuan Yuan Zeng is working on her dissertation on representing modernity and the "other" in mid-19th century Chinese and US magazines.

Where Are They Now? Among our department's far-flung alums…

• Rebecca Spence (BA 2008) went to work at Social Technologies, where she interned during her senior year, on a new project, Futures Expedition, that took her to India and will take her to Moscow in Fall 2009.
• Marta Barkell (PhD 2007) taught a course on health and culture at Marymount U in Arlington, VA, in 2008.
• Karl Austin (MA 2007) teaches earth sciences and one of the few anthropology courses offered in a high school, at Stone Ridge School in Maryland.
• Symantha Holben (PhD 2007) works for Development Alternatives, Inc.
• Lauren Long (BA 2006) is teaching in a dual language (English & Spanish) program in Washington Heights (NYC) under the Teach for America program.
• Megan Biggins (BA 2006) has worked in research firms devoted to healthcare, IT recruiting, and at a trade association, The Coalition for Government Procurement.
• Rebecca Winters (BA 2006) after a year teaching English in Japan for the JET program, interned at the State Department, and entered the graduate anthropology program at the University of Sussex in the UK.
• Joseph Kamanda (PhD 2005) is now teaching in the Sociology Department at the University of Sierra Leone, Cultural Anthropology at the Catholic seminary in Freetown, has been appointed Vicar General of the Diocese, where is also full-time pastor, for which he has found "anthropological training is a great tool."
• Tiffany (Malig) Gaerlan (BA 2005) is marketing coordinator at Still & Svitchan Associates, an architecture/planning/design firm in DC. This could be an answer to "what can I do with an anthropology degree?" Tiffany researched and wrote a senior thesis on marketing and consumption in America.
• Ellen Manning (BA 2005) went to London for the Sports & Culture master's program at Roehampton University, which she says is a "beautiful campus overlooking Richmond Park." Another senior thesis put to work!
• Jim Miller (BA 2004) works in Boston's oldest desegregation program, METCO, on reducing academic achievement gaps which he describes as "my anthropology training hard at work." Click here for his blog.
• Heather A. Whooley (PhD 2003) teaches and practices archaeology at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
• Linda O'Neal (BA 2002) has been teaching school since Fall 2002.
• Dae Tuthill (BA 2001) has gone to graduate school in psychology in California
• Darius Piwowarczyk, who received his PhD in May 2002, moved from teaching at the Divine Word College in Iowa to St. Augustin in Germany to be editor of the journal Anthropos. From January 2010, he will be teaching a new course in cultural anthropology at the University of Cracow in Poland.
• Mark Peterson, who received his MA in Anthropology at CUA and a PhD from Brown University, moved to Miami University of Ohio in Fall 2003 and published a book on the anthropology of mass media.
• Alex Rodlach (MA 2000) finished a doctorate in Anthropology at the University of Florida and has published his study of Witches, Westerners and HIV: Aids and Cultures of Blame in Africa (2006).
• Shelley Howes (MA 1998) worked for the US Peace Corps as Assistant Inspector General for Evaluations before moving to the Inspector General's office at the Department of Homeland Security, where, says, "the roles are very similar but somehow DHS just doesn't seem as exotic!"
• Sandra Scham (PhD 1996) became editor of Near Eastern Archaeology and teaches this department's course on Archaeology of Bible Lands while working as participating faculty for Penn State's GIS and archeological field school in Turkey.
• Kathleen Buckley (PhD 1997) completed an AAA Congressional Fellowship and teaches in the CUA School of Nursing.
• Anthony Guerra (BA 1996) finished working as a researcher for the Geraldo Rivera show and enrolled in the Journalism graduate program at Boston University.
• Rachel Rumberger (MA 1996) has moved from Florida, where she taught Middle East studies at Valencia Community College and created a documentary about Arab-Americans in Orlando entitled "Arabs and Oranges," to Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn Michigan.
• Claudia Spohnholz (MA 1995) reports that after nearly a decade in development work, and a stint at the University of Mongolia, she's gone to work for the Reading Is Fundamental program, where she is "happier, more fulfilled, more connected to the world than at any time in my life."
• Stan Wargacki (MA 1995) finished his PhD in the Sociology of Religion at Lublin University and coordinates the Apostolate for Justice & Peace of the Divine Word Missionaries in Poland. He has recently published several articles on his research In Irian Jaya and on New Age holistic medicine in Poland.
• Susan Trencher (PhD 1994) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at George Mason University and recently published Mirrored Images: American Anthropology and American Culture, 1960-1980 (2000).
• Sonja Remagen (PhD 1993) is chair of the Geography Department at the University of Brasilia.
• Eluned Schweitzer (PhD 1993) went to Russia on a research project.
• Jane M. Walsh (PhD 1993) is a curator for Latin America at the National Museum of Natural History, where she is a specialist in identifying bogus artifacts.
• Lara Henley (PhD 1993) has moved from the DC Office of Historic Preservation to the Federal Office of Historic Preservation at the Department of the Interior.
• Tatiana Bajuk (BA 1990) went on for a PhD at Rice, became a research scholar at the National Academy in Slovenia, and now lives in Brussels, where her husband, Igor, is Slovenia's permanent representative to the European Union and she is doing a study of Eurocrats in the EU headquarters.
• Paul Murray (PhD 1989) teaches in the Religion Department at Bard College, where he also serves as a chaplain. In 2007, he organized a conference there on Christianity in a pluralistic world.
• Elliot Fratkin (PhD 1987) teaches Anthropology at Smith College, has published several books on African pastoralists and co-authored a textbook in Cultural Anthropology (2002).
• Marvette Perez (MA 1986) is curator of Latino History at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where she's done exhibits on popular culture, dress, music and Puerto Rico.
• Gary Haynes (PhD 1981) is professor of anthropology at the University of Nevada-Reno and author of The Early Settlement of North America (2002), Mammoths, Mastodonts, and Elephants: Biology, Behavior, and the Fossil Record (1991) and American Megafaunal Extinctions at the End of the Pleistocene (2009).
• Edward Green (PhD 1974) was appointed by President Bush to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDs. His book, Rethinking AIDS Prevention, based on his research in Uganda was published in 2003.

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