Message from the Chair

As I complete my first year in the chair’s office, I have a new appreciation for the department I’ve been a part of for over 25 years.

Our faculty continue to excel in research and in scholarship, as you’ll read in this issue of the newsletter. Our most recent hire, Sean Downey, is doing exciting work using drone-captured imagery to study land use by Mayan farmers in Belize. Other projects underway by faculty include fieldwork across the globe — Hungary, Ivory Coast, British Columbia, Fiji, Nicaragua, Oman, Cameroon, the U.S. and more.

According to the Center for World University Rankings in 2017, Ohio State ranked eighth among departments of anthropology worldwide, based on rate of faculty publication in high-impact journals. We’re very proud of our undergraduate and graduate researchers, who have won an impressive array of awards and recognitions for their scholarly work.

We’ve been thinking more about how to better communicate with the public about topics that anthropologists are well-versed in, such as race and ethnicity, human evolution and how to interpret the archaeological record. Doing so seems especially urgent now, as unscientific notions about racial difference become more evident in public discourse. APOP (Anthropology Public Outreach Program) is bringing undergraduates, graduates and faculty together to make sure those views don’t go unchallenged. Read on to learn more about APOP’s plans to introduce lessons on anthropology to teachers and students in Ohio’s public schools.

Our speaker series is thriving. Thanks to the generous support of alumna Elizabeth Salt, we were able to host the 2018 Bourguignon Lecture in Art and Anthropology. Dr. Joanne Pillsbury of the Metropolitan Museum of Art shared her insights on luxury and cultural notions of value in the ancient Americas. The Undergraduate Anthropology Club invited Dr. Lee Hoffer to talk about the opioid crisis, and the Graduate Student Anthropology Association brought in Dr. Agustín Fuentes to talk about race and racism from an anthropological perspective.

We are pleased to offer for the first time a new scholarship for undergraduate travel, thanks to the generosity of anthropology alumnus Douglas LeVasseur and his wife, Ethel-Marie D’Luzansky LeVasseur (a graduate of the Department of Psychology). The purpose of the scholarship is to send a student off to experience human diversity through travel abroad — what a gift for a budding anthropologist!

It’s gratifying to know that our alumni think of us from time to time and continue to value their experience as a student here. Perhaps, like me, you believe anthropology offers a uniquely valuable perspective on human diversity. Whatever your anthropological passion, you should find something of interest in our newsletter. I hope you enjoy it.

Kristen Gremillion, Chair Department of Anthropology