Faculty, students, alumni, and friends of the Department of Anthropology gathered in Brooks Hall on Friday, May 13, 2022, to celebrate the career of Professor Fred Damon, who is retiring after more than 30 years of service to the department, the university, and the profession.

Listen to the recollections of colleagues, students, and friends here.

Click here to see more pictures from the event.

The Department of Anthropology is happy to introduce its first Bridge to the Doctorate Fellows: Tia Folgheraiter and Unitha Cherry.

The Bridge to the Doctorate Program is an initiative from the Graduate School or Arts and Sciences at UVA. It was developed out of a deep commitment to diversifying UVA’s graduate programs, the professoriate and the research workforce. It seeks to support post-baccalaureate students from groups that are underrepresented in their disciplines and who have not had sufficient training and research experiences to prepare them for admission to doctoral programs.

The Program provides two full years of fellowship support for students to enroll in a combination of courses, supervised research, and UVA’s intensive graduate student professional development curriculum known as “PhD Plus.” Throughout the entirety of the Program, fellows work in close collaboration with a faculty mentor. Tia’s mentor is Dr. Kasey Jernigan and Unitha’s mentor is Dr. Sylvia Tidey.

Tia Folgheraiter is a Bridge to the Doctorate Fellow and is currently enrolled in the Anthropology master’s program at UVA. She graduated with Honors from Dartmouth College where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and majored in Native American Studies and minored in Environmental Studies. Her senior thesis, Visual Sovereignty and the Contemporary Resistance of Colonial Ecocide in the Navajo Nation, examined the concept of visual sovereignty and how contemporary Indigenous art serves as an allegory to resist environmental degradation from natural resource extraction (coal, oil, and uranium) in the Navajo Nation, with the ability to uphold and assert greater claims to political sovereignty. She has held a range of internships at the Hood Museum of Art, Smithsonian's Nation Museum of the American Indian (Washington D.C.), and Diné Policy Institute. 

Tia is Diné and grew up in the rural town of Tuba City, Arizona on the Navajo Reservation. As a Bridge fellow at UVA, she continues to expand her research interests of Native American art and (mis)representation, visual sovereignty, Indigenous futurisms, tribal energy industries, and federal Indian law. She is committed to Indigenous research methodologies that empower Indigenous communities by centering Indigenous perspectives, voices, and traditional knowledge.  

Unitha ‘Che’ Cherry is a Bridge to the Doctorate Fellow at UVA. She received her undergraduate degree in Anthropology with a minor in Biology from the University of Richmond. Over the course of her studies, Unitha became particularly interested in biopolitics and the feminine body, especially in connection to abortion. She completed three Summer Research Fellowships; worked as a research assistant on a project that aimed to document how the state, identified through the FBI, creates and documents race through “wanted” posters; and was scheduled to give a paper on the analysis of how the state manifests itself in the feminine body during pregnancy and abortion attempts at the Spring 2020 Johns Hopkins Macksey Symposium.  

Unitha was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. This is the first time she has ever moved to a new place, although she did spend a Summer in Santiago, Chile. She is an excellent challah baker (ask her for some!) and on and off practitioner of yoga. Her goals for her time at UVA are to complete an MA Degree in Anthropology, with a specific focus on Medical Anthropology. She will also be looking at the current tension between laws that prohibit safe abortions and the social services that surround the populations especially impacted by these laws.

Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Hantman has received the Jane Moore Essay Award for 2018-2019 from the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society for his publication ‘Eugenicists, Sentimentalists, Activists: Social Theory at the University of Virginia, 1926–1960’ (Magazine of Albemarle Charlottesville History 76-77:71-100).  His paper explores the history of Anthropology and the social sciences at UVA with emphasis on the anti-eugenics and anti-segregation efforts of Professors Floyd Nelson House and Eric Wolf.

You can read Professor Hantman's essay here.

Begun by Craig Newmark as an e-mail to some friends about cool events happening around San Francisco, craigslist is now the leading classifieds service on the planet. It is also a throwback to the early internet. The website has barely seen an upgrade since it launched in 1996. There are no banner ads. The company doesn’t profit off your data. An Internet for the People explores how people use craigslist to buy and sell, find work, and find love—and reveals why craigslist is becoming a lonely outpost in an increasingly corporatized web.

Read the full interview.

Archaeology Brown Bag Workshops provide an informal, interdisciplinary venue for presentations of work in progress by faculty, graduate students, and visiting scholars, and discussion of developments in recent archaeological literature.

Workshops convene four to five times per semester, on Fridays from 4:00-5:15 in the Brooks Hall Conference Room (2nd floor) unless otherwise noted.  

Want to volunteer a talk or discussion topic? Email Adria LaViolette or Fraser Neiman.

For the archive of past Brown Bag Workshops, click HERE.

Professor Pio Saqui (Mopan) of the University of Belize will speak on "Contemporary Mopan Maya: Language, Culture, and Integration in the Developing Nation of Belize."

Friday, June 10, 2022
Brooks Hall 2nd Floor Conference Room
1:00 PM-3:00 PM

Mopan Maya is a group of lowland Maya that still practices their traditional way of life, closely tied to shifting agriculture. Oral transmission of traditional ecological knowledge is still dominant. Recent economic development and global pressures have highlighted some concerns as cultural practices, language and traditions become more at risk. This talk will engage some of these topics as new opportunities are charted for integration of the indigenous in contemporary Belize.

This event is sponsored by: The Center for Global Inquiry & Innovation, The Department of Anthropology, The Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics, and The Multepal Project.

Congratulations to our 2021 Graduating Class!!!

Click here to view the recording of our virtual graduation ceremony celebrating the accomplishments of undergraduates completing their Anthropology major, graduate students receiving their MA Degree in Anthropology, and the zoom-hooding of students completing their doctorate in Anthropology.

The Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America (SALSA) will hold its SALSA XIII Biennial Conference virtually from June 21-June 25 and June 28-July 2, 2021, with the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, as the host institution.
UVa Anthropology professor George Mentore will serve as Conference Organizer.

For more information see the Conference Website or the homepage of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America.

This Spring the Department of Anthropology is co-sponsoring (with the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures) a series of virtual talks by authors of recent ethnographic monographs of the Middle East and North Africa. Organized by MESALC Global Studies Professor Tessa Farmer, these talks are scheduled for five Tuesdays (and one Thursday!) this Spring, beginning March 16th. All talks are virtual, scheduled for 2:00-3:15pm, and open to the public. Zoom links will be provided. The following speakers and topics are scheduled:

Tuesday, March 16

• Gökçe Günel, "Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi"

Tuesday, March 23

• Maria Frederika Malmström, "The Streets Are Talking to Me: Affective Fragments in Sisi's Egypt"

Tuesday, March 30

• Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins, "Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine"

Thursday, April 1

• Zainab Saleh, "Return to Ruin: Iraqi Narratives of Exile and Nostalgia"

Tuesday, April 20

• Joanne Randa Nucho, "Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power"

Tuesday, April 27

• Abdelmajid Hannoum, "Living Tangier: Migration, Race, and Illegality in a Moroccan City"

Each year the Department of Anthropology invites its third-year graduate students to present their proposed dissertation research project ideas to the faculty and Charlottesville community. This year's symposium will take place on Friday, February 26th, from 1:00-3:00pm, via zoom, and will feature the following speakers:

	Richard Deang Pandemic Utopias: Queer Friendships and Shared Futures in Manila and San Francisco
	Jennifer Saunders Persistent Materialities and Negotiated Histories: Activating the Past at St. Emma Military Academy and St. Francis de Sales in Powhatan, Virginia
	Miao Jiang Englishes in a globalized Tibet (the plural is intentional)
	Eniola Afolayan Temporalizing Power: The Co-Construction of Religious Communities in A Nigerian Heritage Site