Graduate Students
Archaeology
My professional and research interests within archeology include Cultural Resource Management, Geographic Information Systems, predictive modeling, stone tool analysis, early agricultural societies and the domestication process in the archeological record.
Hunter-gatherers, technological organization and mobility, prehistory of Alaska and coastal adaptations in the Aleutian Islands, lithic analysis and sourcing.
Plains Cultures, Landscape Utilization, Landscapes of Movement, Paleo-to-Archaic Transition, Historic Cellars, Pedestrian to Horse transition in the Protohistoric period.
Sourcing studies, ceramic technology, experimental archaeology, digital archaeology, digital reconstructions, 3D modelling, landscape archaeology.
Geoarchaeology, Paleoenvironmental reconstruction, paleoclimate, soils and museums.
Archaeological implications of adapting to rapid climatic shifts. I will be conducting an ethnoarchaeological investigation of how the Deg Hit'an people of west-central Alaska are adapting to modern climate change, and the archaeological implications of such adaptations.
Great Plains archaeology, Mississippian archaeology, archaeological theory and method, archaeological philosophy, cognitive archaeology, iconography and symbolism, ceramic analysis, lithic technologies, museum curation, museum collections management, NAGPRA compliance and cultural affiliation.
Geoarchaeology, GIS, Quaternary Landscape Evolution, CRM, and Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction.
Areas that are of interest to me include: human responses to new environments; arctic and subarctic archaeology; peopling of the Americas; Beringia; osseous technologies; migration and interaction; subsistence; museum curation and collections management; and public outreach and community engagement. I am advised by Dr. Sellet and am currently studying the chaîne opératoire of osseous industries in the Aleutian Islands. For 2017-2018, I am the graduate teaching assistant to Dr. Radovanović for Introduction to Archaeology and the Vice-President of Graduate Students for Anthropology.
Geoarchaeology, Quaternary Landscape Evolution, Paleoenvironmental Reconstruction, Landscape Archaeology and Predictive Modeling, Remote Sensing and GIS; Near Eastern and South Asian Archaeology (Focus: Afghanistan), Southeastern US Archaeology.
Biological Anthropology
Anthropological genetics, population genetics, genetic epidemiology
Anthropological genetics, ancient DNA, epigenetics, population genetics, archaic introgression, human adaptation, human migration, human physiology, bioethics, biological aging, stem cell biology, epidemiology, Siberia, Beringia, and the Americas.
Genetic Epidemiology, Anthropological Genetics, Paleopathology, Infections Disease, Epigenetics, Darwinian Medicine, and Evolution of Sex.
Evolutionary genetics, population genetics, ancient DNA analysis, environmental DNA.
Population genetics of Central Asia, morphological variation of modern humans, forensic applications, and psychiatric genetics (particularly ADHD)
I am a second year M.A. student in Biological Anthropology working as a Graduate Research Assistant for my advisor, Dr. Dennis O'Rourke. My research interests are human anthropological genetics and genomics, ancient and modern DNA, migration and population genetics, ecology and adaptation, human evolution and variation. I am also the President of the Graduate Students for Anthropology for the 2017-2018 academic year.
Ancient DNA, Anthropological Genetics, Molecular Genetics, Genomics and Sequencing, Infectious Diseases, Human Migration, Peopling of the Americas, Osteology, and Forensic Anthropology.
Sociocultural Anthropology
Economic anthropology of Xinjiang, China. Influence of industrialization on subsistence societies. Changes in the mode of production and social organization, transformation of cultures and values. Financialization and consumerism, construction of identities through consumption.
Indigenous peoples' rights, migration, Latin America
Medical Anthropology, transference of health knowledge via caregiving’s relationship to the spread of diseases; technology and health; anthropology of disaster; biosecurity; health and rhetoric.
Body politics in postwar Guatemala, the reproduction of marginalization through neoliberal healthcare systems, the production of medical knowledge, the everyday ethics of caregiving & moral worlds of physicians, foreign aid decline in Latin America, development's side effects, and the Ch'orti' Maya area.
The relationship between the military and the discipline of anthropology by comparing each group’s conceptualization of ethics to reveal overlap and identify areas for potential cooperation, peacemaking and how ideas like religion and history influence peace processes.
Ethnogenesis; extractive economies and indigenous political movements; ethnohistory of Amazonian peoples; infrastructure and ICTs (information and communication technologies); indigeneity; kinship; shamanism; memory; violence; Kandozi and Quechua (Inga/Southern Pastaza Quechua); western Amazonia (Peru/Ecuador).
Historical anthropology; the mutuality between organization of sociality and construction of space; kinship, ethnicity and rituals on the landscape in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands; changes in human-environment relations under the development policy for ethnic minorities in Southwest China; cultural transformation and continuity of the Pumi speaking people (Pumizu/Premi/Prmi) in Yunnan and Sichuan, China.
Human-environment interactions, non-renewable resources, socio-politics, economics
Applied Ethics (Environmental Ethics, Medical Ethics), Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Indigenous Ways of Knowing; Interdisciplinary intersections between law, science, ethics and anthropology.
Visual anthropology; structural inequality in public education; demography of educational attainment; racial and economic segregation; urban renewal.
Linguistic Anthropology
Currently conducting research on "light verbs" (what we call yardemchi pe 'il "helping verbs"). My primary focus is Uyghur verbs and grammatical topology, but I am also interested in culture.
I plan to use the corpus of pre-modern and modern Uyghur to research these questions for my PhD dissertation. Creating an electronic corpus will allow tracking the development of these helping verbs of 150 years. We will be able to count them and study their discourse context.
My research focus is on the rise of nationalism Xinjiang and the discursive creation of Uyghur ethnic identity. I am working on applying methods of linguistic anthropology to the analysis of power structure concealed in everyday discourse and the nationalistic manipulation of public sentiments by elites for the purpose of legitimizing power and hegemony.
Persian Language ideology and language identification of Iranian people; Role of idioms and proverbs on a nation’s identification: How Iranians express their identities, personalities and behaviors through using idioms and proverbs.
My research focuses on Uyghur-Mandarin Chinese codeswitching among Uyghurs in northwestern China. I am currently interested in the role codeswitching plays in identity and resistance.
