Sep. 25, 2025 — The department is pleased to announce that on Tuesady, September 30, 2025, McKenzie Alford will defend her dissertation, “An Application of the Archaeology of the Human Experience to Classic Period Hohokam Burials at S’edav Va’aki, Phoenix, Arizona.” The event will be held at 12pm in Room 0120, James M. Collins Executive Education Center.
Sep. 25, 2025 — The Department of Anthropology is thrilled to share that this year’s Wendorf Distinguished Lecture in Archaeology will be given by John D. Speth. Dr. Speth joins us from the University of Michigan, where he is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Curator Emeritus of North American Archaeology at the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. His lecture, “Questioning Assumptions: Many of the Assumptions about Hunter-Gatherer Behavior that Guide Today’s Archaeological Research are Ill-founded or Wrong,” will be held at 5:00pm on Friday, October 3, 2025 at Moody Hall Auditorium.
Sep. 24, 2025 – Next week, the Comparative Political Economy and Society (CPES) Seminar Series, a Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute Research Cluster, will host Stacie Kent, Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at Boston College. The event, which includes lunch, will be held at 12pm on October 2 in the DCII Lobby. Kent’s talk is entitled “Global Capital and Qing Governance in the Treaty Port Era.”
The Comparative Political Economy and Society Research Cluster is convened by Kelly McKowen (SMU Anthropology), Macabe Keliher (SMU History), Roshan Pandian (SMU Sociology), and Hsinchao Wu (SMU Sociology).
Sep. 8, 2025 — The Department of Anthropology invites you to the inaugural Brettell Seminar in Anthropology, featuring Duke University’s Tracie Canada. The talk, “How Black College Football Players Tackle their Everyday,” will be held on September 19, 2025 from 10:00am to 11:30am in the Texana Room at Fondren Library.
More information is available on the poster above.
Sep. 5, 2025 — The Department of Anthropology is thrilled to announce a major new initiative: the Caroline B. Brettell Seminars in Anthropology. This new permanent and endowed departmental lecture series is a tribute to the inimitable example of its namesake and funder, Dr. Caroline Brettell, University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Ruth Collins Altshuler Professor. Before transferring to emeritus status during the 2022-2023 academic year, Dr. Brettell was on the faculty at SMU for four decades, serving at various times as department chair, interim dean of Dedman College, and founding director of the Dedman College Interdisciplinary Institute. Widely recognized as one of the leading cultural anthropologists of her generation, she was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
With her extraordinarily generous financial contribution, Dr. Brettell has put the department in the position to host an annual series of seminars—on topics of broad appeal—featuring rising stars, innovators, and influential voices in Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology. Each year the seminar slate will also include the department’s two distinguished lectures, the Fred Wendorf Distinguished Lecture in Archaeology and the George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology. The events are free and open to all.
More information about the 2025-2026 Caroline B. Brettell Seminars in Anthropology is available here.