Mar. 28, 2025 — The department is thrilled to announce that on April 17, 2025, graduate student Nicolette M. Edwards will defend her dissertation, “Investigating Women’s Provisioning Efforts in the Ethnoarchaeological Record of Central African Forest Foragers.” The event will be held from 1:00pm-4:00pm in Moody Hall’s Room 125. You can join on Zoom with Meeting ID 929 7813 9035 – Passcode 950220.
Mar. 28, 2025 — Visiting Lecturer Aanmona Priyadarshini has a new op-ed out in New Age, a major English-language Bangladeshi media outlet. In the piece, “Freedom is a Verb,” Priyadarshini calls for a confrontation with lingering issues in Bangladesh. “We have a choice to make,” she writes. “We can be indolent optimists, passively clinging to the hope that ‘someone else will bring us freedom.’ We can be opportunistic cynics, smugly saying, ‘Told you, nothing will change,’ as we retreat into the comforts of a so-called ‘normal’ life where nothing is truly normal. Or, we can rise as our own emancipators, breaking every chain that binds us, knowing that ‘freedom is a verb’ — never finished, never complete — but an ongoing action, a relentless drive.”
Mar. 24, 2025 — Every five years, SMU selects a small cohort of acclaimed faculty to be designated University Distinguished Professors. These professors are granted an annual $10,000 research fund for the next five years.
The department is delighted to share that Karen D. Lupo has been selected for this honor and will be a University Distinguished Professor for the 2025-2030 term. We congratulate Dr. Lupo on this well-deserved celebration of her contributions.
Mar. 24, 2025 — In recognition of his enormous impact on SMU, David J. Meltzer has been awarded the university’s 2025 Faculty Career Achievement Award. At the award ceremony, which was held this afternoon in the Hughes Trigg Ballroom, President R. Gerald Turner and Provost Elizabeth Loboa praised Meltzer for his extraordinary scholarship, teaching, and leadership.
Meltzer joined the faculty at SMU in 1984, shortly after receiving his PhD at the University of Washington. He is currently the Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory and Executive Director of the Quest Archaeological Research Program. In addition, he is an Affiliate Professor in Prehistory, Climate and Environment, at the Centre for GeoGenetics, Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1989), a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2009), a Member of the Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas (2009), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2013). He is also the winner of the Society for American Archaeology’s 2025 Fryxell Award for Interdisciplinary Research.
Mar. 21, 2025 — Among the recipients of this year’s Dean’s Research Council (DRC) grants are two Anthropology faculty. Michael A. Adler has been awarded funding for his new project, “The Glaze Ware Conundrum: Picuris Pueblo’s Role in Rio Grande Glaze Ware Production and Exchange, 1325-1700 A.D.” Neely Laurenzo Myers will use her grant for “Strengthening an Application to Design and Test a Safe and Fun Generative AI Companion for Youth Mental Health.”
The department, which was the only one to win multiple awards, congratulates Profs. Adler and Myers!
Mar. 13, 2025 — The Department of Anthropology hosted its annual George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecture on Friday, March 7. This year’s speaker, Bill Maurer, delivered his talk, “Three Models for How Americans Money,” to an enthusiastic audience at Moody Hall Auditorium.
