Department Highlights
Congratulations to Alex Blanchette who has been selected as the winner of this year’s Lerman-Neubauer Prize for Outstanding Teaching and Advising, which is awarded annually to one faculty member in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering judged by graduating seniors as an individual who has had a profound impact on them intellectually, both in and out of the classroom. Graduating seniors were inspired to nominate Professor Blanchette as most influential in shaping their minds. (May 2023)
Nick Seaver was featured on Marketplace discussing YouTube's recommendation algorithm at the center of the recent Gonzalez v. Google Supreme Court case. (February 2023)
Nick Seaver discussed his book Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation on the New Books in Anthropology and Let’s Get Coffee (WYXR Memphis) podcasts. (February 2023)
Nick Seaver's book Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation was featured in The Guardian article "Has Spotify Really Wrapped the Mystery of Musical Taste?" (December 2022)
Nick Seaver's new book Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation was recently published by The University of Chicago Press. (December 2022)
Amahl Bishara wrote for the Stanford University Press blog how "Israel’s Restrictions on Mobility, Large and Small, Are Also Threats to Collectivities, Large and Small." (November 2022)
Alex Blanchette's book Porkopolis was featured in an article by The New Republic about pandemics and bird flu. In Porkopolis, Alex explores how a rural Midwestern community has been reorganized around the life and death cycles of corporate pigs. (September 2022)
Amahl Bishara's new book Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression was recently published by Stanford University Press. (June 2022)
PODCAST (Amahl Bishara): What Solidarity Does
AnthroPod | April 8, 2022
The Department of Anthropology is pleased to welcome archaeologist and anthropologist Craig Cipolla, who will be joining our faculty from the Royal Ontario Museum and the University of Toronto as an assistant professor in Fall 2022. His research focuses on North American archaeology, particularly New England and the Great Lakes. His main interests include archaeological theory, material culture, the archaeology of colonialism, Indigenous collaborative archaeology, and fieldwork. He currently directs the Mohegan archaeological field school in partnership with the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut. In the last few years, his work has come to explore the ways in which collaborative Indigenous frameworks transform archaeology as a form of knowledge production. (April 2022)
Amahl Bishara recently published “Killing Space, Stealing Time: The Stink and Burn of Occupation,” part of the Theorizing the Contemporary: Ecologies of War series in the Society of Cultural Anthropology’s Fieldsights. (January 2022)
Alex Blanchette was awarded the Diana Forsythe Prize for his book Porkopolis. The prize celebrates the best book or series of published articles in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, and/or technology, including biomedicine. (September 2021)
Alex Blanchette's co-edited volume How Nature Works has been awarded the 2021 Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize. (September 2021)
Alex Blanchette was awarded second prize of the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing for his book Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. (August 2021)
Tatiana Chudakova's new book Mixing Medicines: Ecologies of Care in Buddhist Siberia was recently published by Fordham University Press (June 2021)
PODCAST (Nick Seaver): Cracking Algorithmic Recommendation with Nick Seaver
Sound Expertise | June 1, 2021
Alex Blanchette was the recipient of the 2020 Steven Polgar Prize for the best article published in the Society for Medical Anthropology's flagship journal, Medical Anthropology Quarterly. The prize was granted for Blanchette's essay on antibiotic resistance and pork production, "Living Waste and the Labor of Toxic Health on American Factory Farms"
Sarah Luna's book Love in the Drug War: Selling Sex & Finding Jesus on the Mexico-US Border was awarded the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for Outstanding Single Authored Monograph
The Association for Queer Anthropology
American Anthropological Association | September 18, 2020
WATCH VIDEO: Sarah Luna on Her Research for the Award-Winning Book Love in the Drug War
Q&A with Alex Blanchette
Alex Blanchette, Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies, is coeditor of How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet.
News from Duke University Press | May 20, 2020
Voices from the Middle East: Palestinian Refugees in the West Bank Confront the COVID-19 Crisis
Amahl Bishara, Nidal Al-Azza
Middle East Research and Information Project | May 14, 2020
Sarah Pinto on the fascinating Indian dream analysis study that inspired her new book, exploring relationship between ethics and counter ethics
Shikha Kumar
First Post | April 13, 2020
Anthropological exploration takes alumna to Mexico's La Zona in new book
UTSA Today | April 3, 2020
Sarah Luna unboxes her book Love in the Drug War
University of Texas Press | April 2020
Looking Beyond the Struggle for Palestinian Statehood
Amahl Bishara
Middle East Research and Information Project | Spring 2020
Zarin Machanda has been named Usen Family Career Development Assistant Professor.
(January 2020)
Sarah Pinto's new book, The Doctor and Mrs. A.: Ethics and Counter-Ethics in an Indian Dream Analysis has been published by Women Unlimited Press and Fordham University Press.
(Fall 2019)
Alex Blanchette's new co-edited book, How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet, has been published by SAR Press as part of their Advanced Seminar series.
(Fall 2019)
Zarin Machanda was awarded a collaborative NSF research grant to study the evolutionary origins of leadership in chimpanzees.
(Fall 2019)
Sarah Luna was awarded the 2019 Cultural Horizons Prize from The Society for Cultural Anthropology, for her article "Affective Atmospheres of Terror on the Mexico-U.S. Border."
(September 2019)
Tatiana Chudakova was awarded the 2018 General Anthropology Division's Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship.
(August 2018)
Nick Seaver's course "How to Pay Attention" is featured in The New York Times article "Finding It Hard to Focus? Maybe It's Not Your Fault: The rise of the new 'attention economy.'"
(August 2018)
Nick Seaver studies the algorithms that read you and your taste, and the people who build those 'recommendation' services, which tell you what music you're going to like and what you should listen to next. Listen to his podcast with Christopher Lydon, 'The Algorithmic Age', on WBUR Radio Open Source.
Learn more | Listen to podcast
(February 2018)