Spotlight on Staff
Anthropology faculty, staff, and students welcomed new administrative assistant Helen Spencer to our department in June. She works closely with students and faculty to facilitate all aspects of the graduate program and undergraduate registration, provides timetable support, and monitors the department’s website. Helen was born in Alabama. When she was four, her family moved to Iran, where her father worked as a supervisor with Sikorsky. She served in the US Coast Guard and received her associate degree in 2011. Spencer plans to continue her education here at UT. She enjoys spending her leisure time with her two daughters, painting, wood working, and walking along the riverbanks of East Tennessee.
Joey O’Dell joined the department as Archaeological Collections Manager at the archaeology curation facility at Middlebrook Pike in May. She has spent this year consolidating, organizing, and moving equipment to make space for an expanded team working to fulfill our legal and ethical responsibilities under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The reorganization will also result in a better integration of laboratory and curation spaces.
Over the next few months, O’Dell will work with campus and community partners to focus on preparing collections whose management falls outside of NAGPRA for further academic research and begin updating the archaeological collections database to inform future research and increase the availability of collections for professional and student analyses and community-based exhibits. She is working closely with Ellen Lofaro, Anthropology’s Curator of Collections, and our Curation Committee to develop a set of updated curation policies for the department.
O’Dell holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, with a focus in archaeology, and a master’s degree in public history from Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). As a student, she worked at the Center for Historic Preservation and served as the manager of the Archaeology and Public History Labs at MTSU for three years. She is a founding member of the new Community of Practice for Southeast Curation Care which aims to bring curation professionals together to share information, develop ideas, and create solutions for common collections care challenges.