news and announcements
Please join us in honoring Dr. Sandra T. Barnes on the occasion of her retirement. Dr. Barnes received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin in 1974 and has been teaching at Penn since 1973. She was the founding director of Penn's African Studies Center and a consulting curator in the African Section of the Penn Museum. Read more about Dr. Barnes, her work, and her legacy here.
Anthropologies of Africa Across Decades and Disciplines: A Day to Honor Sandra Barnes will take place from 8:30am-5:00pm on Saturday, April 28th. The full schedule can be found here. For more information, contact Christy Schuetze.
Dr. Bernard Wailes, Associate Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Associate Curator
Emeritus of European Archaeology at the Penn Museum, passed away March 30 in
London, England. He would have turned 78 on April 3.
Dr. Wailes was director of excavations at the important Iron Age “royal” site of Dún Ailinne in Co. Kildare, Ireland, from 1968 to 1975, but will be best remembered for his lasting influence on European archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania and in the United States.
Read more here.
Penn Anthro Professor John Jackson has been named the 2012 recipient of the Dean's Award for Innovation in Teaching by the School of Arts and Sciences here at Penn. This award is presented annually to faculty members who have made use of
innovative teaching techniques in the service of outstanding teaching. Dr. Jackson will be honored, along with other award-winners, at a School-wide
reception on Wednesday, April 25 at 4:00 p.m. in 200 College Hall.
To learn more about Dr. Jackson and his work, click here.
On March 5th, the remains of five Irish immigrant workers left the Penn Museum on their way to their final resting place in Laurel Hill Cemetary. The remains were excavated from a mass grave known as Duffy's Cut, located near Malvern, PA. Though the workers were originally thought to have fallen victim to cholera in 1832, Penn Anthropology Professor Janet Monge and graduate student Samantha Cox found evidence that they were actually executed, possibly out of xenophobia, and fear that they would spread the disease.
Read more in the Philadelphia Inquirer, or see a video of Dr. Monge speaking about the team's findings here.
Penn Anthropology MD-PhD student Utpal Sandesara, along with co-author Tom Wooten, will be at the Penn Book Center at 5:30pm on Monday, 3/19 to discuss No One Had a Tongue to Speak, their narrative nonfiction account of the 1979 Macchu dam disaster in India, which killed as many as 25,000 people.
Sandesara's mother survived the disaster, and in 2006 he and Wooten spent 11 weeks in India researching the flood through extensive interviews and archival research. Adam Hochshild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, calls No One Had a Tongue to Speak "an absorbing story not just about bureaucratic ambition and folly, but about power and powerlessness."
Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, has
been awarded a grant from the National Geographic Society and has been
recommended for funding by the National Science Foundation for the study
of the first two sets of twins ever born in the owl monkey
population of Argentina after more than 250 births recorded over 15
years. Read more here, or on the Owl Monkey Project official website.
The project was also featured in a several segments for National Geographic Radio and Video and received a recent nod in Science. Click here to listen to the interview with Dr. Fernandez-Duque, or here to see a video segment.
Research conducted by Adjunct Professor Janet Monge, along with former undergraduate Jason Lewis and former graduate student Mark Meyer from Penn's Anthropology Department, has been recognised in the February 2012 issue of Discover. Their groundbreaking study of the Morton Collection of skulls, housed here at Penn, uncovered evidence of bias and mismeasure on the part of Stephen Jay Gould in his controversial book The Mismeasure of Man. Their findings were ranked number 59 in Discover's list of the top 100 "experiments, discoveries, and new ideas that changed the world" in 2011.
See Dr. Monge speak about the Morton Collection here.
Professor John L. Jackson Jr. has been named Editor-in-Chief of Oxford
University Press' new and ambitious Oxford
Bibliographies project, which attempts to provide scholars, students, and other
interested readers with introductions to important topics and themes from many
academic fields/disciplines. Anthropology's online module was launched last month, and
Oxford was able to put together a strong editorial board for the project, which
included scholars from all four of American anthropology’s major sub-fields:
archaeology, linguistic anthropology, physical/biological anthropology, and
cultural anthropology.
Read more here, or check out Oxford Bibliographies Online.
