Thursday, March 31, 2011

Heather Dingwall Receives Luther Rice Collaborative Fellowship

The Anthropology Department would like to offer its congratulations to Heather Dingwall, undergraduate double major in Biological Anthropology and Archaeology, who received a Luther Rice Collaborative Fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year.

Her project, to be completed under the direction of Dr. Brian Richmond, will involve conducting running and walking experiments using unshod Daasanach subadults in Ileret, Kenya in order to determine how gait, speed, and foot morphology influence the formation and morphology of footprints. Ultimately, the resulting data will provide a comparative context for the analysis of fossil hominin footprints (namely, the footprints from Ileret that have been attributed to H. erectus). In addition, she will assist with the further excavation of the fossil footprint surfaces at Ileret during Summer 2011.

The Rice Fellowships offer support for student-initiated research carried out in collaboration with, and under the guidance of, at least one faculty mentor.

Dr. Catherine Allen Awarded a Specialist Fulbright Grant

Dr. Catherine Allen, Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, has been awarded a Specialist Fulbright Grant to spend a month at Catholic University in Lima. She will offer a five-week seminar on the subject of Thought, Action, and Landscape in the Andes, for students enrolled in the master and doctoral Program in Andean Studies. Additionally, she will offer one or more presentations on her current research as part of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Seminar to be held for one week in Pisac (Cuzco ) in 2011. Finally, she will meet with faculty and graduate students at PUCP (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru) who specialize in Andean visual and performing arts.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Recent Graduate to Present at Two Professional Conferences

Amanda Leonard (M.A. Anthropology-Museum Training 2011) will be presenting "Shadows in the Shelter: The Plight of ‘Big Black Dogs’ in American Animal Shelters" at the Thinking About Animals Conference, co-hosted by the Institute of Critical Animal Studies (ICAS) at its Tenth Annual North American ICAS conference (Brock University, St. Catherines, Ontario, Canada, March 21 and April 1, 2011).

The paper she is presenting in Canada is the same as described in "The Plight of ‘Big Black Dogs’ in American Animal Shelters: Color-Based Canine Discrimination," a paper that has been accepted for publication by The Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, a journal of the University of California, Berkeley.

Ms. Leonard, who has worked as an animal behavior specialist and enrichment coordinator for the Washington Humane Society, used her anthropological training to analyze how people's feelings about color influence what shelter animals they adopt.