Elizabeth Chilton, Associate Professor
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Cultural heritage, archaeology, hunter-gatherers, the origins of  
agriculture, origins of social complexity, technological organization,  
ceramic ecology, geoarchaeology, and cultural resource management, Native peoples of northeastern North America.

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Seamus Decker, Assistant Professor
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Bio-cultural anthropology: social biology, psychoneuroendocrinology, behavioral ecology, disease ecology; Caribbean, North America and Sub-Sahara Africa.

Jean Forward, Senior Lecturer
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Cultural anthropological interests with a focus on colonialism, especially in North America and Scotland. I am also interested and active in environmental and human rights issues, especially Native American Indians, public education; community service and the teaching of history.

Laurie Godfrey, Professor
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I am a biological anthropologist and paleontologist with interests in nonhuman primate anatomy and evolution. I study how individual development provides clues to behavior and to the "life history strategies" of extinct species. I use a variety of techniques to reconstruct the behavior and "lifeways" of extinct animals, with the ultimate goal of being able to reconstruct whole communities of primates in the past, and their transitions to the present. My particular expertise is the lemurs of Madagascar, where I have worked in the field for several decades. On this great island, I have worked with colleagues to better understand the recent extinctions of the "megafauna" (including the giant lemurs).
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Krista Harper, Assistant Professor
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Cultural Anthropology: Culture and the politics of social movements; political cology; medical anthropology; science and technology studies (STS); race, ethnicity, and human rights; area specializations in Eastern Europe (Hungary), Roma (Gypsy) diaspora, and the European Union.

Julie Hemment, Associate Professor
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Cultural Anthropology: Post-socialism, gender and transition, feminist anthropology, Participatory Action Research Methodology, applied anthropology. Russia.
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Brigitte Holt, Assistant Professor
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I am a biological anthropologist interested in human evolution in general, and in the ways humans adapt, biologically and culturally, to their environment. One of my research interests has been on the relationship between physical activity and postcranial skeletal robusticity as a means of inferring behavior in past populations. I was able to show, for instance, that in Upper Paleolithic populations from Europe, there is a marked decline in lower limb robusticity in the latter part of the Upper Paleolithic, after the Last Glacial Maximum (around 18,000 years ago). This confirms archeological evidence of decreased mobility during that period. An ongoing project (the European Project) focuses on the evolution of postcranial robusticity in Europe from Upper Paleolithic to the present, in an effort to answer questions such as: Why do Europeans have such high rates of osteoporosis and fractures? What role does decreased physical activity play in this? When did the major changes occur? What role did factors such as agriculture, social inequality, division of labor, mechanization and industrialization play?   Another research interest centers around the origins of modern humans. Since 2002, I, along with colleagues from Duke University, University of Pisa (Italy) and Arizona State University, have been excavating the site of Riparo Bombrini (Liguria, Italy, a rockshelter  that preserves Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) and Upper Paleolithic (Aurignacian) layers. The main of this project has been to clarify the transition between Neandertals and modern humans.
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Brian Jones, Associate Director of Umass Archaeological Services and Lecturer
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Archaeology: Interst are focused on the preceramic periods of the Northeast, as well as lithic analysis, human ecology, paleodemography, cultural resource management and geoarchaeology. He has a long track record of working closely with the regions Native peoples.

Arthur Keene, Professor
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Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology: Community cooperation, Grassroots community development. Community Service Learning. Kibbutz, Israel and North America.

Elizabeth Krause, Associate Professor
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My book, A Crisis of Births: Population Politics and Family-Making in Italy (2005), is a culmination of my research interests concerning issues of culture and power in the context of a transforming and transnational Europe. I draw on my training in cultural and linguistic anthropology to investigate the cultural politics of gender, class, race/ethnicity and whiteness. A political economy perspective informs my work into local and global dimensions of the politics of low fertility in Italy. I view history and memory as critical to grasping cultural reproduction as well as cultural transformation. My area focus is italy though I have done ethnographic research in Micronesia as well as the United States. I teach undergraduate courses on cultural politics, method and theory of writing, and economic anthropology; I have offered graduate seminars on historical anthropology & social memory, population & governmentality, and European field studies.

Elizabeth Krause's Blog
http://blogs.umass.edu/ekrause/

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Lynnette Leidy Sievert, Professor
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As a biological anthropologist I have focused on age at menopause and symptom experience at menopause as two aspects of human variation. I am also interested in the evolution of menopause and post-reproductive aging as a human trait. Fieldwork on the topic of menopause has taken me from western Massachusetts to Mexico, Slovenia, Paraguay, Hawaii, Bangladesh, and the UK.

Mitchell T. Mulholland, Research Professor and Director, University of Massachustte Archaeological Services
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Archaeology: cultural resource management, applied archaeology, archaeology and the law. Northeast North America.

Enoch H. Page, Associate Professor
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As a cultural anthropologist my interest lies mainly in theories of race and racism in the United States, but also in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora. My field work - in Zimbabwe, Jamaica, the American South and in urban America - has been concerned with the racial intersection between black populations and bureaucracies like schools, the media, hospitals or extension agencies. Lately, my research efforts have been stimulated by failures in academic studies of racism to explore new pedagogical opportunities to intervene into the routine operations of racism through the agency of spiritual (not religious) education seen as a method of effective intervention. My current seminars, 'The Anthropology of Consciousness' and 'Anthropology of Information' reflect my own theory that activism of the future must be differently informed. I believe it will fail to create the needed change unless activists become more grounded in any eclectic spiritual practices designed to create the inner change that can build new knowledges illuminating the potential roles of activism in the evolution of higher consciousness. I currently am working on two books addressing each of these theoretical concerns.

Robert Paynter, Professor
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I study historical archaeology, something I think of as the investigation of the global development, spread, and resistance to capitalism and European expansion. I start this work with the material culture – the artifacts and landscapes – produced and consumed by people caught up in these processes. These material traces are then woven with documentary traces to develop holistic understandings of how the world of today came into being. I have found it crucial to read the theoretical and historical perspectives on capitalism and conquest developed by authors positioned variously throughout the globe, bringing perspectives of people who know the various political economies and cultural forms of the peoples of Africa , the Americas , and Europe . This global focus frames my field work on sites in Western Massachusetts in the US , including work in Deerfield Village in Deerfield and at the W.E.B. Du Bois Boyhood Homesite in Great Barrington. This said, I encourage and sponsor students interested in these local areas as well as those interested in studying capitalism and conquest elsewhere around the globe. Finally, I hold to the idea that historical archaeology is best understood within a broad anthropological perspective, one that compares and contrasts the workings of the modern world with those of archaeologically known ancient and pre-state societies. I find I can best do this work with colleagues in the Anthropology department as well as people interested in Native American Indian studies, Afro American Studies, and Women's Studies. Reflecting my concerns, I teach our introduction to general anthropology for non-majors, Anthro 100 Human Nature, co-teach courses on Native studies, and co-direct our Summer Field School in Archaeology.
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Ventura Perez, Assistant Professor,
Editor-n-Chief Landscapes of Violence
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Bio-archaeology: My primary area of interest is interpersonal and institutional forms of violence.  My work focuses on cultural representations of violence using an interdisciplinary inquiry that includes social science and behavioral and biological research (specifically skeletal trauma), along with the analysis of artifacts and ethnohistoric research.  I view the use of violence as a cultural performance and argue that in order to understand its use we must strive to recognize the culturally specific circumstances under which it is produced and maintained.  My other interests include skeletal biology, taphonomy, forensic anthropology, paleopathology, and the etiology of diseases affecting the human skeleton. My research is currently in Zacatecas, Mexico at the site of La Quemada (AD 900) and in the greater Southwest.

David Samuels, Associate Professor
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Professor Samuels is interested in the relationships between various forms of human symbolic expression, and in finding new ways of linking linguistic anthropology and semiotics to anthropological aesthetics. He teaches courses in linguistic anthropology, music and culture, the role of sound in social life, cultural poetics, and ethnographic field methods. He is also interested in language shift, missionization, popular culture, history of theory, and the U.S. Southwest.

Neil Silberman, Lecturer
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Heritage and Society: International Heritage Theory and Policy; Heritage and International Development; Public heritage Trends; History adn Politics of Archaeology; Archeological Narratives.

Michael Sugerman, Assistant Professor
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I am an archaeologist interested in inter-cultural contact, exchange, and power relations in ancient complex societies. Throughout my career I have investigated Bronze and Iron Age economic structures in the Near East and the eastern Mediterranean through the use of stylistic, elemental, and microstructural studies of plain ceramics and other non-elite, Œordinary¹ goods. Over the course of the past fifteen years, I have carried out field research in many of the countries of the east Mediterranean littoral: Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Turkey, and Greece. At present I am beginning a project on Cyprus in which I will investigate archaeological markers of ethnic identity as well as the ways contemporary researchers assign ethnic identities and boundaries to the ancient populations of the island. I am also interested in the ways we can use ancient texts together with archaeological data to investigate ancient societies. In order to follow through on this interest I regularly teach classes in the departments of Classics and of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies here at UMass.

Jacqueline Urla, Associate Professor
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Gender and Sexuality, Language Politics, Youth and Popular Culture, Nationalism & cultural Identitites, The Ethnography of Resistance, Basques of Western Europe, Visual anthropology. I've done long term ethnographic research on the Basque language revival movement examining such issues as language standarsization, youth community media projects, music, and the political uses of language censuses. At the same time, I also teach and write about gender, sexuality and the body; the anthropology of Europe; ethnographic theory and method. I teach courses in the politics and poetics of visual anthropology and have experimented with creating a digital ethnographic video production lab.

Amanda Walker Johnson, Assistant Professor
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Cultural Anthropology: I am a cultural anthropologist interested in the intersection of critical race theory, anthropology of science, and critical educational theory, and I am committed to conducting research and pedagogy as work for social justice. My research examines the ways in which systems of standardized testing and the production of "scientific" knowledge about race, segregation, failure, and risk, particularly as products of standardized testing, impact education in the US, particularly for African Americans and Latino/as. Additionally, I teach courses related to education and race; critical race theory and political economy of race in the US; feminist theories of race, body, and nation; and cultural and identity politics in the African Diaspora.

H. Martin Wobst, Professor
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Archaeology: theory and method. Old World prehistory, ecology and demography of egalitarian societies, Pleistocene ecology. Europe.

Emeritus and Retired Faculty:

George J. Armelagos , Professor Emeritus email: Physical Anthropology, skeletal biology, race and racism, demography, evolution of diet and disease; Mediterranean Africa.

Dena Ferran Dincauze , Professor Emeritus email:

Ralph Faulkingham, Professor email I am a cultural anthropologist with interests in theories of rural development, especially in Africa. My field work, spanning four decades has been in Hausa-speaking Niger in West Africa, and my research interests there have ranged from local level politics to cultural ecology, to political economy, and more recently to writing an ethnography of local discourses about love, life, and death. I currently co-edit the principal journal of the African Studies Association, the African Studies Review. Download full vita.

Joel Martin Halpern , Professor Emeritus email: Cultural anthropology, photography, historical demography, history of anthropology, temporal perspectives as methodologies, foreign policies and societal impacts, digitization of archival materials. Research in Southeast Europe, Southeast Asia, Arctic and with immigrant groups in U.S. and Canada. For photo collections and archives, see: http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/SEAiT/subcollections/LaosAbout.html http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/galleries/halpern.htm http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/umarmot/?tag=h

Alfred B. Hudson , Professor Emeritus email: Borneo language classification. Historian, Randolph (NH) History Project. Archivist, Randolph Mountain Club. http://www.randolphmountainclub.org

Oriol Pi-Sunyer , Professor Emeritus email: Cultural Anthropology, political and economic anthropology, the modern state, minority nationalism, tourism, maritime anthropology. Europe, Mesoamerica.

Donald A. Proulx , Professor Emeritus email: Archaeology, Andes, Peru, ancient civilizations, ceramics, iconography, settlement patterns. Since my retirement in 2002 I have continued my research on the Nasca Culture of Peru, especially my analysis of the complex iconography painted on their polychrome pottery, in an attempt to interpret and better understand this pre-literate society. For biographical information, research summaries, and on-line papers: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~proulx/

Alan C. Swedlund , Professor Emeritus email: Demography and health in historical New England; population dynamics, demography, and health in the prehistoric Southwestern U.S. Recent research includes a book on medical anthropological approaches to understanding the processes of illness, death, and loss in historical populations. Secondly, I am collaborating with a group doing agent-based computer simulations of population transitions in the prehistoric Pueblo people. I am also conducting research on the health and fitness movements of the American Progressive Era. For biographical information, research summaries, and on-line papers: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~swedlund/

R. Brooke Thomas , Professor Emeritus email: Biocultural anthropology, human adaptability, environmental anthropology, and political ecology. His research has included adaptation and exploitation in high Peruvian Andes, tourism on the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, and community reforestation in India.