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What We Published in Spring 2025

May 30, 2025 — The Department of Anthropology is pleased to share the most recent publications of its faculty and graduate students, including articles in Nature and Science. During the spring 2025 semester, we published the following:

Journal Articles

Essays, Commentaries, and Book Reviews

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SMU Anthropology in the Media: Picuris Pueblo Research

May 29, 2025 — The groundbreaking research published recently in Nature by faculty members Mike A. Adler, David J. Meltzer, and Matthew T. Boulanger was the subject of a news feature on KRQE in Albuquerque (below). This work has also been covered by the Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Smithsonian Magazine, Associated Press, Reuters, LiveScience, ArsTechnica, and other outlets.

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Matthew Abel Selected for Fulbright to Brazil

May 28, 2025 — Assistant Professor Matthew Abel has been selected for a 2025-2026 Fulbright US Scholar Award to Brazil. For his project, “Brazil’s Northern Arc: Transnational Grain Trading and the Forest’s New Fate,” Abel will give public lectures at the Federal University of Pará (Universidade Federal do Pará – UFPA) in the eastern Amazonian city of Belém while conducting research on recent investments in bulk grain trading in the eastern Amazon and their implications for conservation and international climate policy. Between September and December 2025, he will collaborate with the anthropologist Dr. Katiane Silva and other researchers at UFPA’s Institute of Philosophy and the Human Sciences while conducting ethnographic interviews at one of the largest industrial export poles in the eastern Amazon. He will also help organize outreach events related to the thirtieth annual UN Climate Change Conference, which will take place in Belém in November.

Brazil is one of the five largest agricultural exporters in the world and competes directly with the United States in global markets for bulk grains and livestock feed. In the 1990s and 2000s, the expansion of industrial farming methods throughout the country’s central-western agricultural belt fueled growth in the national agribusiness sector. Despite its rapid ascendance as a global agricultural powerhouse, however, Brazil has also sought to maintain its position as an important player in the international environmental movement and leader in climate policy negotiations. Brazil is home to approximately 60% of the Amazon rainforest, and in 1992 hosted one of the most important international environmental governance efforts of the twentieth century: the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. This was the meeting where world leaders laid out the basic framework for international climate negotiations, known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Proponents of the “Northern Arc”–a development scheme and the focus of Abel’s research–contend that, like the Mississippi in the US, the Amazon is well-suited for redevelopment as an agricultural export hub that will refocus development attention away from environmentally destructive roadways towards less carbon-intensive forms of river transport. However, environmentalists argue exactly the opposite–that the Northern Arc has incentivized land speculation, catalyzing a new cycle of frontier development with potentially catastrophic outcomes for the region.

The Fulbright Program is a cultural exchange program that supports international research and education. SMU’s Department of Anthropology’s other recent recipients include Kelly McKowen (Norway, 2023-2024) and Maryann R. Cairns (North Macedonia, 2020-2021).

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Neely Myers Named New Department Chair of Anthropology

May 13, 2025 — The Dean of Dedman College ad interim, Nathan Balke, has announced that the next Chair of the Department of Anthropology will be Neely Laurenzo Myers, Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical School. She will be appointed to a three-year term.

Myers joined the faculty at SMU in 2014. In addition to her appointments in the Department of Anthropology and at UT Southwestern, she is Editor-in-Chief of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry. A psychological and medical anthropologist, her research focuses on cross-cultural experiences of mental health, mental illness, and mental health care. Since 2009, her ethnographic and mixed-methods research in the United States and northern Tanzania has been supported nearly continuously by the National Institutes of Health. She is the author of Recovery’s Edge, a prize-winning ethnography about peer services for persons with serious mental illness, (Vanderbilt University Press, 2004) and Breaking Points: Youth Mental Health Crises and How We All Can Help (University of California Press, 2024), as well as more than 30 scholarly articles and book chapters. She also directs SMU’s Mental Health Innovations Lab and is deeply committed to mentoring undergraduate and graduate students. Outside academia, she enjoys hiking and playing the violin.

 

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Elizabeth Berk Named New Director of SMU Health and Society Program

May 12, 2025 — The department is pleased to announce that the new Director of the Health and Society Program will be Elizabeth Berk. Berk, currently appointed as a Lecturer of Anthropology, is a medical anthropologist whose research examines chronic illness and civil society in contemporary Lebanon. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Yale University in 2021.

The Health and Society Program, which is housed in the Department of Anthropology, is among the university’s most popular and competitive majors. Its students routinely win SMU’s top undergraduate prizes and continue on to leading medical schools and careers in health-related fields.

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Health and Society Students Win Three “M” Awards, Umphrey Lee Award

May 2, 2025 — The SMU Division of Student Affairs has announced the winners of the 2024-2025 Hilltop Excellence Awards, and the Department of Anthropology’s Health and Society Majors are well-represented. Three of ten campus-wide “M” Awards, the university’s highest recognition, were awarded to Health and Society Majors: Jonathan Liu, Pareeni Shah, and Vivian Thai. Another Health and Society Major, Kyra Oladeji, won the Umphrey Lee Award, which “is presented annually to a graduating senior who has demonstrated outstanding involvement in and contribution to the University community while a student at SMU.”

The department congratulates these students on their well-deserved honors!

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Adler, Meltzer, Boulanger Co-Authors on Major Article in Nature

May 1, 2025 — In a landmark study in Nature, SMU Anthropology’s Michael A. Adler (co-first author), David J. Meltzer (co-last author), and Matthew T. Boulanger, along with their international collaborators, including the University of Copenhagen’s Thomaz Pinotti and Eske Willerslev, have used ancient DNA to definitely link the people of Picuris Pueblo with an ancestral heritage site, Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. This innovative research, which brought together archaeologists, geneticists, and the Picuris Pueblo community, is not only groundbreaking in its findings but exemplary in its modeling of tribal data sovereignty.

A video and more information are available here.

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Elizabeth Berk Wins SMU Excellence in Mentoring Award

Apr. 29, 2025 — Each year, SMU’s Office of Engaged Learning selects two faculty members for Excellence in Mentoring Awards. Recipients of the Excellence in Mentoring Award are nominated by their mentees.

We are delighted to share that one of the 2024-2025 winners is Anthropology’s Elizabeth Berk. We congratulate her on this well-deserved recognition of her outstanding advising!

 

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David J. Meltzer Receives 2025 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research

Apr. 22, 2025 — Each year, the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) presents the Fryxell Award, an honor given “in recognition of interdisciplinary excellence.” The SAA has announced that the 2025 recipient is David J. Meltzer, Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory. Meltzer will receive his award and be honored with a half-day symposium this week in Denver at the SAA’s 90th Annual Meeting. The department congratulates Professor Meltzer on this well-deserved celebration of his scholarship!

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Save the Date (Apr 22): Katiane Silva Talk

Apr. 15, 2025 — The department is excited to share that it will host Dr. Katiane Silva (PPGA-Federal University of Pará; Visiting Fulbright Scholar, University of Georgia) for a brown bag talk on Tuesday, April 22, 2025. Her presentation, “Socio-Environmental Conflicts and Resistance in the Demarcation of Indigenous Lands in the Brazilian Amazon,” will be held from 12p-1pm in the Founders’ Room, Heroy Hall 407. An abstract for the talk is below.

Socio-Environmental Conflicts and Resistance in the Demarcation of Indigenous Lands in the Brazilian Amazon

Indigenous territorial rights are frequently challenged by commercial interests to serve global markets. They have been disputed since the colonial period. In the Brazilian Amazon and state of Pará, these rights and broader forest conservation efforts are affected by the advance of soybean monoculture. Throughout the Amazon region, indigenous presence is perceived as mitigating the impacts of the expanding the agricultural frontier, resulting in complex and often violent territorial dynamics. I propose an ethnographic study of socio-environmental conflicts generated by the demarcation of the Munduruku and Apiaká Indigenous Land in Santarém, a region known as the Santareno Plateau along the lower Amazon River, and its local and global impacts. This project examines the resistance strategies of indigenous people and contradictory state practices in a context characterized by increased violence and anti-indigenous policies between 2018 and 2022.