Current Graduate Students

Çağla’s Ph.D. project investigates the discrepancies and inequalities that appear in the state, science, and capital intersections by transnationally tracing the propagation and production of an orange cultivar grown in southern Turkey. Simultaneously, she explores the possibility of creatively imagining these intersections through a decolonial praxis that addresses historical and local epistemologies. Çağla was selected as a Mellon Ph.D. fellow for 2022-23 and through this fellowship, she became a part of The World Studies Interdisciplinary Project (WSIP) which establishes an international

My primary research foci are bioarchaeology, paleopathology, mortuary archaeology, forensics, Indigenous archaeology, NAGPRA & Repatriation, community-based archaeology, population histories, biological distance, migration, and social organization. I am interested in theorizing the concept of "insularity", migration in the Neolithic British isles, and in using bioarchaeological techniques and data to ask questions about islandscapes and Seascapes.

Research: Indigenous archaeology, ethnography, historical archaeology and outreach, ethnography of archaeology, the examination of transitional sites for North American tribes during the early reservation period.

Research: Research examines place branding strategies employed to make place "attractive" in Eastern France, language ideologies, materialities and conceptions of space and place under late-capitalism

Research: I am interested in the Anthropology of housing, materiality in the domestic sphere and particularly curious about the social dynamics of communal living.

I am originally trained as a family physician and worked in Public Health System in Ecuador for almost 10 years providing healthcare to under-served rural communities. I worked on the front lines during the first 16 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, seizing the moment to ethnographically document how the pandemic hit the ground and affected the daily lives of rural Ecuadorian families. For my research proposal, I’m mainly interested in studying care in precarious conditions by family and kin and also deepening my understanding of healthcare workers--their strengths and their weaknesses. Since

incoming Fall 2024

Jeff Coyne is a graduate student of anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he is pursuing a degree in Community Engaged Research & Practice. His current research focuses on the political economy of the overdose crisis, grassroots tenant organizing, US housing policy, and the ways in which contemporary narratives about addiction are internalized by drug users. He previously worked for the People’s Harm Reduction Alliance and Department of Public Health in Seattle, and currently works as a tenant organizer & in a leadership role at the nation organization Changing the

I am currently a Ph.D. student in the department of Anthropology. I hold a BA in English, Psychology, MA in English, and a MPhil in Comparative Indian Literature from India. I have over 8 years of work experience with civil society organizations and prior to attending UMass, I was with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. My personal experiences and field insights have shaped the focus of my current research interests that including topics such as state-citizen relations, resource allotment, community-based mobilizations, identity politics within the discourse of food in India and

My research explores how to build cooperative, relational worlds amidst the ongoing violence and accumulating ruins of capitalist modernity. Currently, I am working on a worker-owned cooperative farm in Western MA where I document and engage in practices that might allow us to notice, cultivate, and embody relational worlds on/with/as part of a 7-acre plot of land.

I am currently a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Betsy Krause. My research explores biomedical influences on conceptions of kinship and disability.

Seth Dornisch is an Anthropology Ph.D. student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds bachelor's degrees in psychology and anthropology (2013), and a master's degree in communication sciences and disorders (2016) from the University of Florida. He is a nationally certified and licensed Speech-Language Pathologist specializing in gerontology. His anthropology research is informed by clinical experience working with people in late-life who have disorders of communication, cognition, and swallowing. By taking a four-field anthropological approach to questions of human well-being

I am a biological anthropologist specializing in human osteology and muscle function. My dissertation investigates how specific subsistence activities impact both muscle function and bone structure among the Tsimane, a pre-industrialized Indigenous community in lowland Bolivia. Age plays a critical role for muscle and bone development and dictates which activities individuals partake in; therefore, my work with the Tsimane spans a wide age range between 10 to 70 years old. In addition to my research in Bolivia, I also am engaged in a study that examines ontogenetic changes in cortical and

Decolonial Research Methodologies, Food Studies, Sociocultural Anthropology

Research: Social movements, political ecology, energy, science and technology, climate justice and degrowth, Spain.

critical university studies; participant-based ethnography; abolitionist and decolonial feminisms

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Comparative Primatology Lab lead by Dr. Jason Kamilar. Broadly, I am interested in the evolution and ecology of baboon species (Papio) in Africa, as well as how environmental factors impact the distribution, movement, and speciation of primates in general. More specifically, my dissertation research focuses on how the quality and quantity of food and water influence Kinda baboon (Papio kindae) movement ecology and spatial memory, and in turn, how these factors (i.e., food and water) affect Kinda baboon gut microbiomes. I also examine the microbiomes, pathogenic

My research interest looks at the intersection of digital technology, human relations, and geopolitics. I'm looking to explore the infrastructure that gives life to our digital lives and the infrastructure, policies, and workers that make the digital world possible.

Research: Biological anthropology, Forensic Anthropology & Archaeology Education K-12 Outreach.

Research: cultural and linguistic anthropology; Critical Race & Intersectional Theory; race meta-discourse in the U.S.; arts-based research methods and translation; white fragility

Laura is currently an MA/Ph.D. student specializing in primatology in the Department of Anthropology. She holds a BA in Anthropology and BA in Art from the University of Florida. She has conducted field research on the changes in Madagascar’s ecotourist regions from before and during the pandemic and hopes to understand more about human-primate interactions through microbiome research. She is passionate about all things lemurs, environmental education, and conservation.

Castriela Hernández-Reyes is a Palenquera woman who was born in Barranquilla, Colombia. She is a mother, intellectual, scholar, and doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. As a Black/Decolonial feminist anthropologist from South America, she studies how interlocking systems of power, oppression, and exclusion operate and intersect in war contexts and how they are tied to unbroken colonial patterns of racism in Colombia. Her published works appear in Latin American Perspectives and Latin American Research Review. Additionally, she is one

My interests are in applied anthropology, the anthropology of childhood, critical service learning, participatory action research, Photovoice, and antivoluntourism.

Marybelle Issa is a PhD student in Linguistic Anthropology who studies the intersections between language and identity.

Terrell “TL” James is a Ph.D. student in the Anthropology department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. TL’s research hijacks principles from community-engaged methodologies to explore how Black youth use, re-articulate, challenge, and produce Black radical thought through activism and grassroots organizing. TL is concerned with the ways in which antiblackness underwrites the (im)possibility of ethical and reciprocal engaged practices for research with Black communities and calls for critical interrogation of the assumptive logics of community-based methods. His work brings together

Urgyen is a current graduate student in Community-Engaged Research and Practice at UMass Amherst, a trainer with UACT, and a practitioner of Abhyas Somatics. Their work explores intersections of somatic embodiment, cultural organizing, transformative philanthropy, and theater for social transformation. They find joy in cultivating and supporting spaces for individual and collective liberation, playfulness, and connection. And decaf coffee! That’s the ticket to lasting joy, really.

Catie is interested in the commensal microbe communities colonizing various body regions in Kinda baboons and primates. She is particularly interested in the transmission of microbiota between Kinda baboons, bats, and the berries they share at Kasanka National Park in Zambia, as well as the health implications of this transmission. For her dissertation, she will be investigating microbial transmission between straw-colored fruit bats, Kinda baboons, and the fruits they both feed on during the bat’s roosting period.

Research: Health and inequalities, biocultural medical anthropology, environmental degradation, and human health, political ecology of resource extraction and toxic exposure, oil drilling and small scale gold mining, interculturally and indigenous peoples Amazonia Peru.

Research: Indigenous archaeology, experimental archaeology, perishable artifact, community, and arts-based research, and public archaeology.

Alana Mazur (she/ela) is a Ph.D. student in Anthropology. Her current research interests lie across the intersections of cultural anthropology, environmental anthropology, migration, and science and technology studies. Mazur has investigated the connections between transnational and global political economies and settler colonial formations across the Americas through an interdisciplinary and comparative lens. In this line, her master thesis highlights how Indigenous women’s aesthetics of resistance to the nation-state and its mechanisms of dispossession interrelate on local and transnational

I'm interested in communication as a form of enacting and negotiating care, specifically in rural unhoused communities in western North Carolina / Appalachia.

Research Interest: gender and armed conflict, corporeality and experience, language and discourse, Decolonial theory, political violence in Latin America, and Epistemologies of the South.

My research encompasses current economic responses to capitalism. Other related topics: political economy, feminist theory, critical epistemologies, resistance, Italy, Latin-America.

I plan to use an epistemological framework to examine how traditional knowledge practices and structural inequalities relate to participation in climate change solutions in disadvantaged and underserved populations.

I am a North American archaeologist specializing in Indigenous and contemporary archaeology. My doctoral dissertation investigates the material and cultural signatures of natural resource extraction on Indigenous sovereign lands. My research examines the construction of the Canadian crude oil corporation, Enbridge’s recent pipeline, Line 3 on Anishinaabe treaty lands in northern Minnesota. My work explores the human and environmental relationships surrounding Line 3 within the current climate crisis and the larger context of the past 500 years of settler colonialism. This work demonstrates the

I graduated with a MA in Anthropology in 2022 from the American University of Beirut, where I wrote my thesis on practices of care and multispecies relationships in Beirut, Lebanon. I was also actively involved in state-opposition groups, particularly after the October 17 uprising in Lebanon. Because of this experience, I'm particularly interested in anthropology as a space to work collaboratively with marginalized groups and imagine/create alternative worlds. In my Ph.D. research, I hope to examine prison systems in Lebanon by centering on the lived experiences of people who are incarcerated

I am a Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology, focused on investigating the intersections of colonization, race, multi-species ontologies, art, and design. I seek to make arts-based, sensory ethnographic work that explores the nature of anti-racist, decolonial activism among human and non-human communities in the climate change era. I have training in software development, new media arts practice, design research, and creative writing. My dissertation is a multimodal project that seeks to explore multi-species relations and designs for alternatives to capitalism in Latinx communities in South

As an undergraduate, I studied genetic diversity in groups of wild chimpanzees in Senegal to better inform future conservation efforts in the area. As I continue my education, I want to understand the evolutionary circumstances surrounding primate social dynamics, mating strategies, and family structures. Using both fieldwork and molecular research, I want to explore the factors that pushed primates to develop the diverse assortment of behavioral characteristics we see today.

I am a native anthropologist who focuses on issues of identity amongst native Hawaiian youths and how these identities are crafted, expressed, and curated through sartorial and music choices and displayed on the social media platform Instagram. This digital third space is a place for me to work through ideas for my dissertation; ideas may not be fully fleshed out or coherent but they are not intended to be so. Ideas here are all works in progress and should be considered as such.

Research: Relational ethnography of the state, focusing on the agrarian bureaucracy in Mexico and the contradictions inside the agrarian jurisdiction regarding the protection of indigenous territories.

Research: Postsocialist Anthropology; Czech/the/Republic; Foodways; Environmental anthropology; Gender Studies; Violence Studies

Research interests lie in primate ecology, primate diet and nutrition, feeding behaviors, and community ecology. Diego's most recent work was in Thailand, where he studied how gibbons disperse seeds in a dry dipterocarp forest.

I am a native of Louisiana and received my BA in Women's and Gender Studies, MA in Anthropology and Master of Library and Information Sciences from Louisiana State University. In my time as an archivist, working with cultural and historical materials from Louisiana's queer and BIPOC communities drew my attention to the precarity of the cultural history and peoples of the Gulf Coast as climate change increasingly presents dangers to its most vulnerable populations. As a Black feminist anthropologist, my research interests focus on the intersections of race, gender and sexuality with climate

Abby is a current graduate student of archaeology under Dr. Sonya Atalay and Dr. Haeden Stewart. She draws upon her experience in CRM archaeology, NAGPRA, and museum collections to bring a descendant-centered approach to archaeological landscape interpretation. Her collaborative work with Dakota communities in what is now Minnesota is an example of how she uses archaeology as a tool to connect the public to the many stories of the land they inhabit. She believes that strong connections to land, history, and people create strong communities.

My research project covers the 2020-2021 social and political uprising in Belarus. I work with the concepts of post-socialism and neoliberalism and address social movement theories, disability, aging, and gender issues. I graduated from the Belarusian state university and got my Master's Degree in Sociology in the Higher School of Economics in Moscow where I worked as a senior lecturer for the School of Media and research fellow for the International Laboratory for Social Integration Research.

Through researching the genetic mechanisms and functionality behind primate hair coloration, I hope to understand the history of hair coloration in primates. Furthermore, by understanding these genetic mechanisms, I intend to shed light on how and why the Order Primate evolved to be one of the most colorful groups of mammals. As of today, almost 70% of primate species are listed as vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered and by understanding the functionality of hair coloration, we can hopefully change these numbers around.

Research: Comparative genomics and social evolution of primates, specializing in sifakas (Propithecus). Phylogenetics, multi-level selection and evolutionary theory, conservation, cultural evolution, Malagasy primate.

My research is at the intersections of identity, policy, violence, and health through the lenses of bioarchaeology, forensic anthropology, and medical anthropology. This work, which is based primarily in Reykjavík, Iceland, has been funded by the Fulbright-National Science Foundation Arctic Research Grant, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Leifur Eiríksson Foundation fellowship, and the Armelagos-Swedlund Dissertation Writing Award. My dissertation research looks at human cadaver recruitment in medical institutions, focusing on the rise of race-based anatomical