Graduate Program in Anthropology
Kudos – Spring 2016
Dissertation Defenses (completed or scheduled)
Padmini Iyer
Kartikeya Saboo
Dissertation Proposal Defenses (completed or scheduled)
Shauhin Alavi
Tom Conte
Nada El-Kouny
Dunstan Matungwa
Michelle Night-Pipe
Rene Studer Halbach
Tim Weldon
Awards, Grants, Presentations Posters and Papers:
Shauhin Alavi received an NSF DDIG to support his dissertation research on cognitive foraging in wild orangutans. He was also co-author of a published paper in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology titled “The dark side of the red ape: Male-mediated lethal female competition in Bornean orangutans.”
Donna Auston published a short piece in Anthropology News (“Finding Black Death on a Quiet Hilltop”), co-authored an Op-Ed in Al Jazeera English (“Muslim Americans and Bernie Sanders”), and has an article accepted in the journal Transforming Anthropology (“Prayer, Protest, and Police Brutality: Black Muslim Spirituality and Resistance in the Ferguson Era”). She presented talks at Villanova University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society. She also had media appearances on Al Jazeera English (“Gender and Islamophobia”) and BBC World Radio (“Donald Trump & Islamophobia”). Finally, she received an Honorable Mention in the 2016 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship competition.
Allison Bloom presented a paper, “The Weight of Violence: Aging, Infirmity and Domestic Violence Among Latina Immigrants in the United States,” at the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society, where she also served as a discussant for another panel. She was accepted as a Graduate Fellow for the Institute for Research on Women’s weekly seminar next year on “Feminist In/Security: Vulnerability, Securitization, and States of Crisis.”
Thomas Conte received three awards to support his dissertation research in 2016-2017: an NSF DDRIG, a Fulbright IIE, and an award from the American Institute for Mongolian Studies.
Nada El-Kouny received two grants to support her dissertation research in 2016-2017: an NSF DDRIG and a Wenner-Gren dissertation fieldwork grant. She also presented four talks: at Indiana University (Invited Lecture "Five Years Rising: Martyrs, Memories, and Materiality in the Wake of the 'Arab Spring' " at the In Light Documentary Film Festival); the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society, and two talks at the CUNY Graduate Center. She continues to serve as President of the Middle East Studies Graduate Forum (MESGF) at Rutgers University.
Fred Foster had an abstract accepted for the upcoming International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology.
Melanie Jackson had a co-authored poster accepted for the joint meeting of the International Primatology Society/American Society of Primatologists.
Mareike Janiak received a grant from the International Primatological Society to support her dissertation research. She also delivered a podium presentation at the American Association for Physical Anthropology entitled "Dietary adaptations in digestive enzymes of New World primates."
Tristan Jones presented two papers: at the Rutgers’ Center for Race and Ethnicity Graduate Forum (“Building the Settler State: Tar Sands Development, Landscape, and Indigeneity in northern Alberta, Canada") and the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society (“Forcing Incoherence: Building the Settler State in Alberta’s Tar Sands"). He also chaired a “Meet the Author” panel and organized a graduate student “meet-up” at the AES meeting. He has been selected to serve as the AES section reviewer / program chair for the AAA Annual Meeting and as one of three jury members for the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Cultural Horizons Award.
Meghana Joshi presented two papers: at the Rutgers-Camden Graduate Student Conference in Childhood Studies (“Berlin’s hypervisible Children: “German child-unfriendliness” amidst Demographic Anxieties”) and the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society (““Male Infertility and “Couvade” in Berlin: Laboring to Achieve Paternity”). She also served as a discussant for a different panel at the AES conference.
Senem Kaptan has received a Graduate Assistantship for 2016-2017 to serve as a peer advisor at GradFund in the Graduate School. She also organized and chaired a panel entitled “Trials in Europe: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives” at the 23rd International Conference of Europeanists in April 2016 on which she also presented a paper (“The Politics of Prosecution: Treason Trials of Military Officers in Contemporary Turkey").
Alysse Moldawer co-authored a paper in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology titled “The dark side of the red ape: Male-mediated lethal female competition in Bornean orangutans.”
Alexander Pritchard had a co-authored poster accepted for the joint meeting of the International Primatology Society/American Society of Primatologists. He was also awarded alternate status for the Fulbright IIE.
Darcy Shapiro had two podium presentations accepted for the International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology; presented a poster (“Characterizing the trabecular bone of the primate ischium and its relationship to locomotion in Rudapithecus hungaricus”) at the American Association of Physical Anthropology annual meeting; and was invited to write an entry on pelvic variation for the International Encyclopedia of Biological Anthropology.
Juan Pablo Vera Lugo has published a chapter in an edited volume: “Transitional Justice, Memory and the Production of Legal Subjectivities in Contemporary Colombia,” in Sense of Justice in Latin America, Sandra Brunnegger and Karen Falk, eds. Stanford University Press.
Kartikeya Saboo organized a panel, presented a paper (“Incoherent subjects, Incoherent knowledge, Incoherent Anthropology”), and served as discussant at the annual meeting of the American Ethnological Society.
ALUMNAE/ALUMNI:
Susan Coiner-Collier (PhD 2015) has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame.
