ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER
Greetings from the Chair
Dear Alumni,
I hope you are having an enjoyable summer. This will be the last alumni newsletter I send out, as Professor Mitch Irwin will become the new chair of the department this upcoming academic year. In addition, the department has had a few other personnel changes: Professor Judy Ledgerwood retired this summer, and a new cultural anthropologist, Professor Ivan Small, has joined our department and is the new director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. We are also pleased to welcome Margaret Alway to our department as our new NAGPRA Assistant. Please read more about these faculty and staff in the pages ahead.
Our faculty and students continue to be involved in a wide range of exciting research, and we are happy to highlight some of their work in this newsletter as well as the accomplishments of two of our alumni. I hope you enjoy reading about their endeavors.
Retirement
We want to congratulate Professor Judy Ledgerwood on her retirement this summer. She began at NIU in 1996. She was Chair of the Department of Anthropology from 20042010, Acting Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences from 2017-2020, and she served as the Director
I wish to thank everyone who donated to our department’s Foundation account. Thanks to your generous support, we were able to provide small grants to three graduate students who are conducting their thesis research this summer, and to two graduate students who attended national conferences last academic year. If you are interested in helping to support our new cohort of graduate students, please find information on how you can donate on Page 15
Finally, I want to thank the alumni who are serving on the Alumni Advisory Board. The Board has helped to plan biannual events for the department, including panels on careers in anthropology. If you would like to join the Board, please let me know, as we would love to have you join our quarterly Zoom meetings.
Hope you all have a very happy summer!
Leila Porter, Chair
for the Center for Southeast Asian Studies from 20122017, and most recently from 2021-2024. In addition to her roles in leadership, she has taught a wide variety of classes, advised many M.A. thesis students, and served on countless graduate committees. Finally, she has an extensive research record, publishing books, book chapters and articles, and giving numerous presentations at regional, national, and international conferences. We will greatly miss having Judy in our department, but we wish her a happy and much-deserved retirement.
Welcome to the New Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Professor Ivan Small comes to us from the University of Houston. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University and his research focuses on trans-Pacific and transAsian circulations of people, finance, gifts, and commodities. His last book, Currencies of Imagination:
Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam (2019, Cornell University Press) examines the sociocultural dimensions of transnational remittance economies. We look forward to having him as a new faculty member in our department and to working with him as the new Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
Welcome to Our New Staff Member
The Department and Pick Museum of Anthropology received its third grant from the National Park Service to help bring our collections into compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. We received funding for a oneyear NAGPRA Assistant,
Faculty Recognition
Professor Giovanni Bennardo was the first member of our department to be awarded a Service, Teaching, Artistry & Research (STAR) Promotion. The NIU Faculty Union (United Faculty Alliance) negotiated these promotions for full professors who have contributed to the mission, vision and values of
and Margaret Alway began in that role in March. She is helping to initiate consultations with Native American Tribes, and she will continue to review our collections for compliance issues. The Department and Museum are pleased to have already repatriated materials to several tribes, and we are thrilled that she can help us build relationships with Tribal Nations across the US.
their department, college, and/or university. STAR awards can be granted to faculty who have held the rank of Full Professor for more than five years. He received the STAR award in recognition of his extensive publications, successful grantsmanship, and commitment to the mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students.
Conference on Undergraduate Research and Engagement
This year, several undergraduate students were engaged in research with faculty. These students were able to present posters about their research at the Conference on Undergraduate Research and Engagement (CURE) on April 30.
Our students and their faculty mentors presented the following posters:
• Fixed or Flexible: Do Closely Related Lemur Species Diverge in their Nutritional Niche? Presenter Bellamy Taylor with Faculty Mentor Mitchell Irwin.
• Exploring the Dynamics of Code-Switching Among Mexican-Americans: Motivations, Linguistic Realization and Communicative Goals. Presenter Fatima Serrato with Faculty Mentor Giovanni Bennardo
• Thais in Illinois Oral History Project: Living Archaeology, Artifacts, and Implications. Presenter Alia Moran with Faculty Mentor Kanjana Thepboriruk
• Cultivating Connections: Paleoethnobotanical Insights into Mississippian Lifeways at the Collins Site (c.10001150 AD). Presenters Jennifer Hernandez and Emma Bell with Faculty Mentor Dana Bardolph
• Stronger Storytelling with Museums and Theatre. Elizabeth Nowak with Staff Mentors Jessica Cima and Gibson Cima.
Elizabeth Nowak with her poster and display at the April 30 conference.
Alia Moran next to her research poster at the CURE Conference.
Student Award Winners
Outstanding Undergraduate
We are pleased to give the 2023-2024 Outstanding Undergraduate award to Bellamy Taylor. Although he was originally an English major, Taylor was inspired to pursue a degree in Anthropology after taking a class with Professor Irwin. Taylor has been working with Professor Irwin for the last two years in the Primate Nutrition Laboratory at NIU. He presented results from this collaboration as a poster at the spring 2023 Undergraduate Conference for Research and Engagement. Taylor has been an exceptional undergraduate student,
and we are excited to have him join our graduate program in fall 2024 when he will continue his research under the mentorship of Professor Irwin.
Dean’s Award
This annual award is given to a graduating senior majoring in anthropology who has achieved both a strong record of scholarship and made outstanding contributions to the university community. We recognized Zander Jones as the 2024 Dean’s Award winner. He had a near perfect GPA in anthropology, and he has served in various leadership roles in the department’s Anthropology Club, including as the vicepresident this past academic year. With Jones’ help, the Club has increased its membership, and promoted an excellent sense of community amongst the undergraduates.
Outstanding Graduate Students
Just as we do for undergraduates, we also choose an M.A. student to be our annual Outstanding Graduate Student for the academic year. In 2023-2024 we had two exceptional M.A. students, and so we named Bailey Raab and Mitchell Rigert as co-winners.
Bailey Raab was the Head Teaching Assistant in the 2023-2024 academic year and served as an excellent mentor for first-year graduate students and undergraduates. Bailey’s M.A. thesis focused on plant use among ancient and modern Native American people in the Ohio River Valley. She has presented her work at national
conferences over the last two years. Bailey will attend the doctoral program at Binghamton University in fall of 2024 to continue her archaeological research.
Mitchell Rigert conducted his research in Thailand working with Karen youth group leaders. His presentation of this research at the Council of Thai Studies Annual
Outstanding graduate student award winners and their advisors at the Spring Department Honors Reception.
Left to Right: Dana Bardolph, Bailey Raab, Mitchell Rigert, Micah Morton and Judy Ledgerwood
Meeting in fall 2023 earned him the distinction of second place for the best Graduate Student presentation. He will be starting a new job as a Qualitative Data Analyst with the Memory Keepers Medical Discovery Team at the University of Minnesota Medical School in Duluth.
Graduate Research NIU Foundation Grant Recipients
Thanks to generous donations from alumni, faculty and friends, we were able to fund travel for five graduate students.
Thesis Research
Conference Attendees:
• Mitchell Rigert presented results of his thesis at the Association for Asian Studies, with a talk entitled, “Keeping the State at a Distance through Legibility: A Karen Youth Group’s Efforts to Maintain their Swidden System in Thailand”
• Cameron Thomas attended the American Anthropological Association Annual meeting to present his work on “Re-Feminizing the Divine: Understanding the Cultural Constructs of Gender and Sexuality in a Church-Based Christian Community”
Three other students received grants for thesis research.
• Bailey Raab, for her thesis titled “Plants Are Friends and Food: Reinterpreting Fort Ancient Plant Use through Indigenous Ontologies and Traditional Ecological Knowledge.”
• Edgar Villeda, for this thesis on “The Role of the Gut Microbiome in the Dietary Adaptations of Diademed Sifaka to Tannin Rich Foods.”
• Meghan Hanson for her project, “Learning through sharing: the role of food sharing in juvenile saddleback tamarin development.”
Undergraduate award recipients Zander Jones (left), Bellamy Taylor (center) and Chair Leila Porter (right), at the Department Awards Ceremony in May 2024.
Degrees Conferred 2023-2024
Undergraduate Students
Fall 2023
Austin Cowan
Spring 2024
Leslie Alvarez
Zander Jones
Aaron Melville
Bellamy Taylor
Graduate Students
Summer 2023
Sylvia Scoggin
December 2023
Casey Farmer
Mitchell Rigert
Cameron Thomas
May 2024
Annalisa Amber
Summer 2024
Anna Chitwood
Milsy Westendorff
Bailey Raab
Some of the 2024 Graduates from left to right: Annalisa Amber (M.A.), Cameron Thomas (M.A.), Casey Farmer (M.A.), Zander Jones (B.A.), Bellamy Taylor (B.A.), Mitchell Rigert (M.A.) and Chair Leila Porter
Alumni Spotlights
Nadia Byleska (M.A., 2017)
In 2015, Nadia Byleska came to NIU from Ukraine as a participant in the Fulbright Graduate Student Program. At NIU, she pursued a master’s degree in Anthropology with a focus on Linguistic Anthropology under the supervision of Professor Giovanni Bennardo. During her studies, she worked as a graduate teaching assistant for the Anthropology Department and completed a summer research internship at Northwestern University with the support of the Edmund Muskie Internship Program. After her experience in academia, she returned to Ukraine and pursued a career in the tech sector. Byleska currently works as a technical communication specialist and a user researcher at ELEKS—one of Ukraine’s leading providers of software engineering and consultancy services. Since 2018, Nadia works on projects for different customers and domains, and for the past three years has been focusing on projects in the biotechnology sector. She is currently involved in a research and development project that aims at producing a system for faster, cheaper, and more adaptive manufacturing of cell therapies for blood cancers. Byleska is a part of the team who conducts qualitative research with the potential users of the system to better understand their current practices and needs, collect their feedback about the system prototype, and generate reports with insights for the engineering team. Her responsibilities also include supporting research activities, such as semi-structured interviews and user testing, maintaining the database of the data collected during a three-year period, developing tagging taxonomies, processing data, and producing research reports on the topics of interest. She analyzes information needs of the end users and creates materials, such as information portals, knowledge bases, and various types of instructional content to support them in the process of system adoption. A path into the corporate world was an unexpected career turn for Byleska, but she is happy to participate in meaningful projects and work for an employer who supports Ukraine and the local community during the wartime.
Sara Belarmino (B.A. 2020)
Sara Belarmino began her Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in fall 2022. Her master’s thesis research focuses on Filipino Traditional Tattooing practices in Hawai‘i among diasporic Filipinos as a way to reconnect and revitalize their cultural heritage. Belarmino belongs to the Student Affiliate program in the East-West Center, and currently serves as the co-president, representing about 400 graduate students from over 35 countries. In that role she has had the honor to host events such as an International Potluck, and celebrations of Diwali and the Lunar New Year. She received a Fulbright-Hays Scholarship in June of 2023 which allowed her to return to her ancestral homeland of the Philippines. During her time in the Philippines, she met academics from the islands of Mindanao, learned Filipino, and became closer to her Filipino heritage. Her time in the Philippines allowed her to meet other diasporic Filipinos, and to discuss their shared struggles and experiences. She found that many in the diasporic community had rejected their Filipino background early in life but had later learned to embrace and appreciate the Filipino culture. Belarmino is thankful to those who helped her in her academic journey, particularly Helmut Publ, Ph.D. who inspired her to enter the field, and Kristen Borre, Ph.D., who taught her about decolonization and Public Anthropology. Belarmino also wishes to recognize the community that has welcomed her into their homes in Hawai’i. She is honored to conduct research in Hawai‘i and recognizes that these islands were stolen from the native Hawaiian people. Finally she wishes to thank the ‘āina (land) for providing her with food and shelter: Maraming maraming salamat - deepest thanks.
Graduate Student Spotlight
Bailey Raab (M.A., 2024)
Bailey Raab (M.A., 2024) has examined human-plantrelationships of the Fort Ancient, an archaeologically defined cultural group that occupied the Ohio Valley from 1000-1750 CE. She began her research by compiling published data on plant remains from Fort Ancient sites: most of these past studies have used the methods and theory of human behavioral ecology, with a primary focus on the number of calories people consumed. She next began analyzing samples from the Turpin site, an early Fort Ancient site located near the mouth of the Little Miami River in Ohio. She chose to work with samples from the Turpin site as she can compare her analyses to those from previous studies. Finally, Raab reinterpreted the previously published and newly analyzed datasets through a theoretical lens that includes Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Native Science. This lens allows her to incorporate ideas from Indigenous ethnobotanists who are descendants of the Fort Ancient peoples, including Robin Wall Kimmerer, Linda Black Elk, and Kim Blaeser. Raab hopes that this new interpretation will shine a light on the relationships Fort Ancient peoples had with plants that extended beyond caloric intake and shift our understanding of human-plant relationships in the past and present.
Bailey Raab (M.A., 2024) at an archaeological field site.
Faculty Spotlights
Professors Leila Porter and Mitch Irwin have embarked on a new collaborative project to investigate the importance of insect prey in the diet of the saddleback tamarin in Bolivia. Irwin runs the Primate Nutritional Ecology laboratory at NIU. Over the past 15 years, he and his graduate students have examined the nutritional strategies of several species of lemurs in Madagascar, species that primarily consume leaves and fruits. He had not previously analyzed insects in his lab, as his study species do not eat insects. Porter has studied saddleback tamarins for many years at the Tahuamanu Biological Field (TBS) Station in Bolivia. Her previous research showed that insects are an important part of the monkeys’ diet, but she did not have data on the nutritional value of the tamarin’s insect prey.
Over the last two years, Porter and Irwin have been developing methods for studying insect nutrition. In 2022, Porter and NIU undergraduate, Mikayla GorzemanMohr and two Bolivian collaborators undertook a pilot project to determine how to catch and store insects in the field for nutritional analyses. Fortunately, they developed very successful protocols, and collected 1300 insects in Bolivia for nutritional analysis back at NIU. This past academic year, Irwin and his graduate student Edgar Villeda analyzed these insect samples to determine their nutritional value. They found that the insects are high in protein and fat and low in minerals. Using these field and lab data, it will now be possible for them to estimate how much fat and protein a monkey will gain by eating an insect of a given type and weight.
Next year, Irwin and Porter plan to submit a grant that would provide funding for a year-long study of tamarin diets. Their aim would be to determine what strategies these monkeys use to balance their nutritional needs during different seasons when foods like insects and fruit vary in abundance. Understanding their dietary strategies is important for determining if and how the tamarins will cope with changes in food availability due to the impacts of climate change and human encroachment on the monkeys’ forest habitats.
Saddleback tamarins scanning the forest.
From left to right, TBS Manager, Pablo Sergio, NIU student Mikayla Gorzeman-Mohr, Leila Porter, and Bolivian National Museum of Natural History staff member Paola Noreiga showing off the 1000th insect they caught at the TBS.
Edgar Villeda (left) and Mitch Irwin in the Primate Nutritional Ecology Lab processing insect samples.
Photos by Leila Porter.
Faculty Highlights
William Balco published one article in the journal Layers: Archeologia, Territorio, Contesti and one book chapter in Adoption, Adaptation, and Innovation in Pre-Roman Italy: Paradigms for Cultural Change (Brepols Publishers, Turnhout, Belgium). He presented his research at the 2023 Council for Minnesota Archaeology Conference. He also led a public-engaged archaeological research project in Georgia with members of the Blue Ridge Archaeology Guild, the Greater Atlanta Archaeological Society, members of the public, and undergraduate students from Georgia State University. In addition to teaching at NIU, Balco directs Cultural Resource Management projects for the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Assistant Professor Dana Bardolph received funding from the Brennan Foundation and the NIU Center for Latino and Latin American Studies to begin a new field project in the northern Peruvian highlands in summer 2024. She also received NSF and NIU funding to bring a team of graduate and undergraduate students to the Society for American Archaeology Ethics Bowl in New Orleans in April 2024, where they competed in a debate-style competition and proposed solutions to ethical dilemmas that archaeologists face, from field sites to universities and museums to digital spaces like online forums.
Professor Giovanni Bennardo received an NIU Research and Artistry grant that allowed him to travel to Tonga and Italy to collect data for his current research on the linguistic and mental representation of quality distinctions (adjectives) in Polynesian and Indo-European languages. He published a co-edited book for PalgraveMacMillan titled Cognition In and Out of the Mind: Advances in Cultural Model Theory and he co-edited a
Special Section for the Journal of Qualitative Psychology In November 2023, he organized a roundtable for the 121st Annual Meeting of The American Anthropological Association and presented a paper entitled Linguistic Behavior and Cultural Models: Expressing Quality Distinctions at the 18th Meeting of Society for Anthropological Sciences. As a result of his research and service over the last five years, he was awarded a STAR Award at NIU.
Kris Borre, Ph.D., gave a talk entitled, Building Communiversity Donation Garden Partnerships Across Communities of Faith: Cultivating Trust through Teaching Youth, at the at the annual conference of the American Association of Geographers. She developed partnerships among interfaith communities and the Institute for the Study of the Environment, Sustainability, and Energy (ESE) to create and expand church donation gardens through teaching regenerative agricultural, food and nutrition education, and sustainable food systems to NIU students and community members. The results of these efforts led to a two-fold increase in vegetable and fruit production last year and increased distribution to more households in the community through newly developed collaborative gardening partnerships.
Professor Mitch Irwin continues his fieldwork at the Tsinjoarivo-Ambalaomby protected area in Madagascar, as well as nutritional analysis of lemur foods on campus. In fall 2023 he published an article, “Activity budget and seasonal activity shifts in sympatric lemurs” in the American Journal of Primatology, in collaboration with Vololona Rahalinarivo (a Malagasy Ph.D. student he co-advised). He is currently preparing articles comparing nutrient intakes and food preferences in brown lemurs and diademed sifakas and continues to serve as the vicepresident of the Midwest Primate Interest Group.
Associate Professor Emily McKee has appreciated shepherding two cohorts of students through servicelearning projects, in the Waterworlds class fall 2023 and in the Nature in Society class spring 2024. During the spring 2024 semester, she began a term serving as assistant chair for the department. In an effort to respond to the ongoing crisis in Gaza, she has written and spoken at various events on and off campus, including panel presentations organized by a coalition of NIU students and an educational event hosted by Water Allies and the University of Toronto.
Assistant Professor Micah Morton took the lead in organizing the 51st annual meeting of the Council of Thai Studies (COTS). He also published several articles: “Stoking the flames of ethnic politics?: Translating Indigeneity into post/neocolonial Myanmar/Burma,” in Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia; “The Buffalo Skin Written Word: The cultural politics of orality and the written word in mainland Southeast Asia,” in South East Asia Research; and “Multiculturalism from below: Indigeneity and the struggle for recognition in Thailand,” the Journal of Anthropological Research
Professor Leila Porter continues her research at the Tahuamanu Biological Research Station in Bolivia. She presented results of her work at the Universidad Mayor San Andres, La Paz, and Universidad Amazónca de Pando in Cobija in May and June of 2024. She also has worked closely with Christy DeLair to bring the Department and Pick Museum collections into compliance with the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. Porter and DeLair received grants from the National Park Service to fund the second of two year-long NAGPRA Assistant positions and visits of Tribal Representatives to the NIU campus.
Professor Mark Schuller has been Acting Director of the Center for Nonprofit and NGO Studies, leading the effort on a strategic plan, increasing the Center’s research profile and connecting with alumni. He was invited to keynote a university research conference and presented his work at six universities. Mark had one piece published in American Anthropologist, and he published an article cowritten with students from his class, Anthropology and Contemporary World Problems
Pick Museum of Anthropology
Award of Excellence for “Good Food” exhibit
We are excited to share that the “Good Food” exhibit was recognized with an Award of Excellence from the Illinois Association of Museums. This exhibit, which was open Sept. 21, 2023 to May 11, 2024, highlighted issues in northern Illinois and outlined what organizations and individuals are doing to make food good – accessible, sustainable, equitable and healthy – for everyone in the community. The exhibit examined topics such as reducing food insecurity, improving access in rural food deserts, caring for soil health, sharing gardening resources and knowledge, cultivating sustainable methods for production agriculture, advocating for fair labor, managing water quality, rethinking nutrition education, revitalizing Indigenous foodways and connecting with others through food.
The Awards committee commended the Pick Museum on the multiple viewpoints on food explored by the team of student curators, who drew attention to farm workers’ rights, food insecurity and modern farming practices. In addition, the use of community partners to provide additional subject matter knowledge was deemed exemplary by the committee. The exhibit was developed and curated with students enrolled in a spring 2023 independent study on “Exhibitions and Interpretation” led by museum director Christy DeLair
For the student curators – Debbie Allen, Annalisa Amber, Atlas Babcock, Ben Driver and Sylvia Scoggin – the award recognizes their research, passion and effort. “It was really rewarding to see the exhibit come together from the research I had been doing,” said Driver, one of the five student curators. “From working with collaborators to finally seeing it in the museum gallery, it was a fulfilling experience.”
Upcoming exhibit: “At Play” Sept. 24, 2024 through May 10, 2025
Museum staff, including several student curators, are working this summer to prepare the next exhibit which considers the question “how do we understand play?” through a social science perspective. The exhibit looks at play through toys, games, sports, imaginative play and other playful interactions or activities. Several themes weave throughout the exhibit, such as wellbeing, competition, education, imagining and creating worlds, connection to place, and belonging. Planned sections include primate play, therapeutic play, eSports and video games, ball games, dolls, miniature and model making, Live Action Role Playing, educational toys, strategy games, tabletop games and holiday games.
Please join us for a reception at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 26 to celebrate the opening. We’ll be sharing details on other events soon, including game nights, gallery talks and workshops on making toys and games.
www.niu.edu/pick-museum
@pickmuseumniu
Support Graduate Education and Research
We have a long, rich history of training the next generation of anthropologists. Our graduate students are a large part of that success, in addition to supporting our research mission.
You can support graduate education and research by making a gift to our department. Gifts to our department support our greatest areas of need, including being
able to award students small grants to assist them in completing their thesis research, and presenting their results at regional and national conferences.
To support graduate education and research, go to our online giving site. Please select “Anthropology” from the pull-down menu listed in the box that says “Click here to search available designations.”
Help Us to Continue Our Tradition of Excellence
By giving to the Department of Anthropology, you are playing an important role in supporting students and faculty. There’s a method to fit just about any budget, like annual giving or planned giving and endowments. For more information, please contact Director of Advancement Laura Knight at 815-753-2390.
There are several ways to make your gift to Northern Illinois University's Department of Anthropology.
Online: Make a credit card gift online (designate your gift to the Department of Anthropology).
Phone: 1-877-GIV-2-NIU.
Mail: One-time credit card payments or check gifts may be made using the Gift Form
Contact Knight directly at 815-753-2390 or laura.knight@niu.edu
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology Stevens Building 190 | 815-753-0246
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