From the Carrels

Anthropology graduate students are hard at work locally and globally. The McClung Museum recently hired doctoral candidate Sadie Counts as curatorial project manager. Her research focuses on the reappropriation of institutional spaces as means of dissent and resistance by Indigenous communities in East Tennessee. 

As part of a multi-sited ethnographic research project including Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, doctoral student Brian Boyce is currently studying masking and masquerade as an intrinsic part of the Mardi Gras tradition. His work examines these practices as important forms of cultural resilience and resistance in the African diaspora.

Doctoral candidate Mac Archer’s research focuses on the emotional labor of orphans and nannies to the functioning of orphanages in Haiti. She has worked during the last year as a consultant for the international NGOs Project Hope and Mercy Corps in Haiti. In November 2023, Archer was featured in an interview entitled “The Emotional Labor of Care-Affected Children” by the podcast Think Orphan.

Between teaching, taking classes, and writing theses and dissertations, anthropology graduate students are also finding time for exciting side projects. Doctoral students Taylor Bowden-Gray, Brigid Ogden, and Elizabeth Tarulis recently received an EXARC Experimental Archaeology Award for their project “Skin Deep: Determining the Efficacy of ZooMS Methods on Processed Intestinal Artifacts.” In collaboration with the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory, they have used Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry to determine which animal species was used to make a condom recovered archaeologically from the fill of an 18th-century well in Maryland. Their work will also examine how manufacturing processes may affect artifact preservation and explore the efficacy of non-destructive analyses. 

The Anthropology Graduate Student Association (AGSA) continues to manage the food pantry, a popular and essential free resource for students. AGSA provides snacks, shelf-stable food, household supplies, and hygiene products to all department members. This spring, AGSA members are also working with the Undergraduate Anthropology Association (UAA) to plan a panel that will include advice to undergraduates about the process of searching for and applying to graduate programs. AGSA has also been holding regular social events to allow graduate students to get together in a more informal setting, with faculty invited to join once a month. They celebrated the end of the fall semester by attending Emo Karaoke night, where students ate holiday cookies and performed their favorite Emo hits together.