CUA Anthropology Department News & Announcements

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E-ANNOUNCEMENTS (internships, grants & fellowships)

Lucy Cohen receives the 2008 Sol Tax award of the Society for Applied Anthropology

in recognition for "exceptional leadership and long-term service to the SfAA and the profession of anthropology in a variety of activities."  Dr. Cohen has served the SfAA as Program Chair, chair of the Sol Tax Award Committee (earlier), on the Government and Legislation Liaison Persons Committee and has been a long-time supporter of more student participation in the Society as well as of non-academically employed anthropologists.  Dr. Cohen is nationally known for efforts to get cultural dimensions of health and wellness included in health care training;  she's served on community boards in Washington, chaired the mayor's Commission on Latino Community Development, and is a co-founder of the Spanish Catholic Health Center in DC.

CUA Anthropology grad publishes book on cultural tourism, becomes 'First Lady' of the European Union. 

Tatiana Bajuk-Sencar (BA 1990) has published a book on 'cultural tourism' (Kultura Turizma) and is now working on a study of 'Eurocrats' in Brussels, where her husband, who is Permanent Representative of Slovenia to the European Union, will serve as the EU President in 2008.  Tatiana was a double major in Anthropology and also in French, which comes in handy for her role as 'diplomatic spouse', and for raising their two children in Brussels.  It's also a really cool fieldwork language.

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 will work for Social Technology, a global research and consulting firm.  Kathleen Gallagher plans to spend the next year with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.  Katie Beatty is going to Florence for post-bac art study with Studio Art Centers International.  Not pictured, Jacqueline Nemeth.

Visitors in 2007-08...  Please welcome

Dr. Anna Fournier, visiting assistant professor, will teach ANTH 101- Introduction to Anthropology: Cultures in a Global Society, ANTH 202 - Sex and Culture, and ANTH 250 - The New Political Anthropology.  She finished her PhD on civic education and the political culture of youth in the Ukraine at The Johns Hopkins University, has previously taught at JHU and at Goucher College, and is working on the interplay of community identity and authority in public schools with the Center for Social Orgnization of Schools in Baltimore.

Mr. Gregoire Delhaye will be a research associate of the department this year while working on Coptic diasporic politics as a case of transnational political advocacy and how religious freedom becomes an international norm.  He is a PhD candidate at the Institut d'etudes politiques (Sciences-Po) in Aix-en-Provence, where his master's thesis in 2000 was on “Christian charities in Egypt: building action in the constraints of the environment”.   Forensic Anthropology Summer Course Dr. David Clark in the lab with some of the twenty high-school students who took his special course on forensic anthropology  in Summer 2007.

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 Seniors - Class of 2006

Anthropology Graduates in 2006

BAs (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)

Our Award-Winning Anthropologists!

Jeff Splitstoser - Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks (2005)

Barbara Wolff - Fulbright Dissertation Fellowship (2004-05)

Professor Phyllis Chock, selected by Undergraduate Student Government as 2004 recipient of the James E. Dornan Memorial Teacher of the Year Award "for outstanding classroom teaching, advising, and publications," and graduating seniors...

Daphne Dador winner of the Sam Williams Memorial Award for significant contributions "to the activities of minority and international students, enhanced communication, and furthered understanding among culturally and ethnically diverse groups on campus" and Meghann McBeath winner of a Student Activities Award for significant contributions "to the student body's social and personal development through an untiring involvement in cocurricular activities... that make an impact upon the campus community."

Ryan Welsh (Anthropology '03) received the Ronnie McManes Award at CUA's 2003 Homecoming.  The annual award recognizes a football player who has succeeded both academically and athletically. 

Congratulations to Dr. Phyllis Chock on her retirement after teaching at CUA since 1971.  She served six years as department chair, as many as editor of the Anthropological Quarterly and, as president of the Anthropological Society of Washington, organized a symposium that resulted in a volume she edited (with June Wyman) on Discourse and the Social Life of Meaning, published by the Smithsonian Press in 1986.  Over the years, her research moved from expressions of ethnicity among Greek-Americans to cultural constructions of citizen and alien in path-breaking work on Congressional testimony which contributed to the revaluation of "ethnicity" and "identity" in American anthropology now incorporated into the US Census.   At CUA, Dr. Chock supervised dissertation projects from New Guinea to Africa to the US and taught courses from theory and method to linguistic anthropology, including immensely popular courses on gender, cultures in a global world, and identity in America.  The Undergraduate Student Government recognized that achievement with their James E. Dornan Memorial teacher of the year award in 2004, and on her retirement, the department presented her a antique Chinese bowl of appropriately ambiguous provenance along with our genuine thanks for her unambiguous contributions.

Anthropology Graduates in 2003

• James Ryan Welsh, B.A.
  Senior Thesis: "Sacrifice and Its Role in the Social Organization of the Inca Empire"
• Tammy Bryant, M.A.
  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, Ph.D.
  Dissertation: "Perceptions of a Riverine Ecosystem of Leon Province in Northwestern Spain: Cultural Models of Three Generations of Leonese Fishermen"
• Daniel Arthur Koski-Karell, Ph.D. 
  Dissertation: "Prehistoric Northern Haiti: Settlement in Diachronic Ecological Context"
• Alessandra Sartori-McCormack, Ph.D. 
  Dissertation: "Cecina de Leon: The Production, Comsumption, and Cultural Representation of a Spanish Traditional Food in a Global Economy"
• Paul Assante Appiah, Ph.D. 
  Dissertation: "Lineage and Consumption in the Context of Ghana's Structural Adjustment Program: The Miners of Ghana Manganese Company, Nauta, Ghana"
• Heather Anne Wholey, Ph.D. 
  Dissertation: "Hunter-Gatherer Settlement Demography: An Estimation and Comparative Assessment for the Piedmont Virginia Archaic"

Lectures & Events (coming)

Summer (2007) Work - Faculty

• Dr. Jon Anderson has been on sabbatical (2006-07), working on a book on Internet pioneers in the Middle East and completed a chapter on "Electronic media and new Muslim publics" for the New Cambridge History of the Middle East and two entries for the second edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World.
• Dr. Lucy Cohen is a member of the Asian Pacific American Conference Planning Group of the Library of Congress for a conference about their collection and was invited to organise a session on Latina Immigrant Women for 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology.  She continues as a consultant at the Ricci Institute and Library of the Bureau of Civic and Municipal Affairs in Macau, where she has been researching the China discovered by the Jesuits.
• Dr. Anita Cook worked on the Conchopata Archaeological Project. 
• Dr. David Clark continues his community archaeology work in northern Virginia and taught a course on Forensic Anthropology for high school students in CUA's Summer School. 
• Dr. David Guillet, having finished his book on water management in Spain, spent much of the Summer preparing a research proposal on trust in virtual communities. 
• Dr. Laurie King-Irani, who was a visiting assistant professor for 2006-07, has accepted a staff position at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

Students' Projects & Summer Work

Katie Beatty (class of 2008) on an archaeological dig in Jordan, 2007	Kathleen Gallagher (class of 2008) at archaeological field school in Turkey, 2007

• 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 doing dissertation research in Peru.

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

• Marta Barkell (PhD, 2007) taught a course on health and culture at this Summer at Marymount U in Arlington, VA.
• Lauren Long (BA, 2006) is teaching in a dual language (English & Spanish) program in Washington Heights (NYC) under the Teach for America program.
• Rebecca Winters (BA, 2006), finished a year teaching English in Japan for the JET program and will enter the graduate anthropology program at the London School of Economics in 2008.
• 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) is living in London and has been accepted in 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."
• 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
• Tatiana Bajuk (BA, 1990) went on for a PhD at Rice, became a research scholar at the National Academy in Slovenia, and is now in Brussels, where her husband, Igor, is Slovenia's permanet representative to the European Union and EU President in 2008 and she is doing a study of Eurocrats in Brussels.
• Anthony Guerra (BA, 1996) finished working as a researcher for the Geraldo Rivera show and enrolled in the Journalism graduate program at Boston University. 
• Darius Piwowarczyk, who received his PhD in May 2002, moved from teaching at the Divine Word College in Iowa to St. Augustin in Germany,where he's now editor of the journal Anthropos.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 (Wesport, CT: Bergin & Garvey 2000).
• Sonja Remagen (PhD 1993) is chair of the Geography Department at the University of Brasilia.
• Eluned Schweitzer (PhD 1993) is in Russia on a research project.
• Jane M. Walsh (PhD 1993) is a curator for Latin America at the National Museum of Natural History.
• 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.
• 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.
• Edward Green (PhD 1974) has been appointed by President Bush to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDs. His book, Rethinking AIDS Prevention, based on his research in Uganda will be published shortly.
• 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).
• 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.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR UNDERGRADUATES

Graduate & Professional School Fair, time and place to be announced soon.

 

Publish your essays and photographs on-line.   Focus: An Online Publication of Undergraduate Essays and Photography in Anthropology is a new website created by a senior at Kenyon College.  See the flyer posted in the office, send email to Kate Adams, or check out the her website at <www.focusanthro.org>.

 

Study Abroad opportunities are listed on our E-Announcements page.

 

The Presidential Management Intern Program (PMI) provides an opportunity to students completing graduate degrees in a wide variety of disciplines to work as interns with challenging and rewarding assignments in support of public service programs, federal departments and agencies, and all cabinet departments of the U.S. Government. Assignments involve domestic or international issues, technological changes, criminal justice, health research, and financial management, among many other opportunities.  Check our E-Announcements.

 

Additional internships, study grants and fellowships are posted on the Bulletin Board in the Commons Room, and E-Announcements on this website.

 

OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRADUATE STUDENTS

Grants-in-Aid for full-time Graduate Students in Washington Area Consortium Universities ...
... are offered by the Cosmos Club Foundation of Washington, DC, up to $3000 to meet specific research needs not covered by other supporting funds - such as expendable equipment, travel to research sites or professional meetings.  Tuition and basic research expenses are not covered.  For students enrolled in programs leading to graduate degrees in Consortium universities.  Application information and forms available on-line at http://www.consortium.org

Deadline for applications: November 

 

Other announcement from government agencies and foundations are available in the department office.

 

 

OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRADUATES

Academic Job Announcements are posted regularly on the bulletin board in the commons room.

 

The American Anthropological Association has launched its new AAA Career Center for job seekers and employers at http://www.aaanet.org/careers.htm.  Using this new, interactive, online tool, you will be able to mount a successful career-building campaign.  You can view all recently posted job openings at http://aaanet.search.jobcontrolcenter.com/index.cfm, or use our “advanced search” utility to pinpoint only those opportunities that match your specialty, desired location, or other needs (see http://aaanet.jobcontrolcenter.com/search/ ).  You can also post your resume or CV so that employers can search for you http://aaanet.jobcontrolcenter.com/apply/advertise.cfm.  

Some Important Deadlines and University Information

Fellowship and grant applications to programs of the SSRC, NSF, Mellon and other foundations are due in October. Check the files in the office or with your advisor for the programs that you might apply to.

 

CUA's committee for reviewing research on human subjects has announced its schedule of meetings for this year.  On the bulletin board in the office.

 

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting is in Washington, DC this year (November 2007). You can register on-line and check out the preliminary program, at the AAA’s website <http://www.aaanet.org/>.

 

Find that Grant!  The  files of The Grant Advisor PLUS (including TGA-PC) are now on-line. This provides access to a set of databases for federal and private funding opportunities in disciplines from Fine Arts to Miscellaneous. Available on the campus network (only) at www.grantadvisor.com/tgaplus/.

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