Current Graduate Students
Anthropology Graduate Student Association
The Northwestern Anthropology Graduate Student Association (est. 2012) is a student-run group that holds quarterly meetings for all anthropology graduate students, hosts occasional workshops and other events, and provides mentorship and orientation for new students. AGSA liaison committee members, elected yearly, coordinate activities and meet with faculty members on issues of interest to graduate students. The liaison committee can be reached at agsa.northwestern@gmail.com.
Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga (she/they)
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate Summer 2018)
Regional Focus: Latin America and the Caribbean/Abya Yala; México
ashleyagbasoga2021@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga’s dissertation, titled We Dance With Existence: Black-Indigenous Placemaking in the Land Known as México and Beyond, illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous women engage in placemaking practices that reveal and unsettle notions of race, place, and (nation-) statehood in México. Merging ethnographic and archival research with theories and methodologies from Anthropology, History, Black Studies, and Native/Indigenous Studies, Agbasoga argues that Black-Indigenous placemaking practices create two critical ruptures: first, in the (re)produced bifurcation of blackness and indigeneity, and second, in the Mexican state’s racialization of its territory as mestizo. This work contributes to conversations in Black and Indigenous studies, as well as a long history of Black/Indigenous political movements throughout the hemisphere and globally.
Sofyan Ansori
Arryman Scholar Fall 2018
Regional Focus: Indonesia
SofyanAnsori2022@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Sofyan's research examines the governance of forest fires in Indonesia, particularly to the way environmental interventions are embraced, lived, and/or contested by both local people and state actors.
Jacob Aronoff
Biological Anthropology (PhD Candidate Winter 2021)
Regional Focus:
JacobAronoff2022@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Developmental plasticity and life history theory, quantifying brain energetics using ultrasound, developing a field-friendly cell culture method for studying inflammatory regulation
Bobbie Benavidez (she/her)
Biological Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2019)
Regional Focus:
bobbiebenavidez2022@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Indigenous knowledge, human population genetics & health disparities.
Emily Barron
Biological Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2021)
emilybarron2026@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Neurological health, adaptation, development, and evolution. Life history theory, intergenerational and transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, the embodiment of biosociality and its relationship to public policy
Archaeology (PhD Candidate Spring 2020)
Regional Focus: East Anglia, Suffolk, Bury St. Edmunds
SarahBreiter2017@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: I explore the environmental ideologies of the feudal to capitalist transition through standing buildings.
Project Website: East Anglia Building Landscapes
Cultural Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2018)
Regional Focus: Eastern Africa
AustinBryan2025@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Federalism, the East African Federation, and the development of a new territory of freedom
Biological Anthropology (PhD Candidate Spring 2020)
Regional Focus: Chicagoland, Illinois, USA: Traditional homelands of the people of the Council of Three Fires, the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa; as well as the Menominee, Miami and Ho-Chunk
MargaretButler2023@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Margaret’s research focuses on postpartum health, specifically related to human lactation. Applying mixed methods and a biosocial approach, her dissertation research examines the relationship between breastfeeding and postpartum depression among Chicagoland birthing parents participating in an on-going, hospital-based study. In addition to her graduate studies, Margaret became a certified lactation counselor in 2018 and is an active member of the Chicago Region Breastfeeding Task Force.
Twitter Handle @bioanthmags
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate 2019)
Regional Focus: Middle East and North Africa (MENA); Amman, Jordan
KyleCraig2023@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: My dissertation examines the intersections of youth temporalities, the affective resonances of urban material, and the politics of public aesthetics via the graffiti/street art scene in Amman, Jordan. I attend to the multitude ways Amman-based graffiti/street artists channel their experiences of Amman as an “empty” city with high unemployment and scant spaces for youth leisure and creative expression into public art projects that for them represent small steps in the constitution of the ideal future city. One core impetus for this project is to underscore the need to move beyond the often restricting and romanticized framework of “resistance art” when examining the nexus between youth politics and aesthetics, particularly in the MENA region.
Foroogh Farhang
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate Spring 2018)
Regional Focus: Middle East, Iran
forooghfarhang2015@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Social suffering, post-war trauma, ethnic/religious minorities
Julio Garcia-Solares
Cultural Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2021)
juliogarciasolares2027@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: My work is focused on Latinx experiences and meaning-making within metal and hardcore punk music scenes in the United States. Key terms: Latinx communities, United States, critical phenomenology, racism, diaspora, aesthetics
Livia Garofalo
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate 2017)
Regional Focus: United States, Latin America
livia.garofalo@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), subjectivity, care, trauma, injury, the state
Gerpha Gerlin
Medical/MPH (Doctoral Student Fall 2020)
Regional Focus: United States, United Kingdom, Haiti
ggerlin@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: I am a PhD/MPH student & Science in Human Culture Cluster Fellow, working around issues related to psychiatric disease & disablement, identity politics, knowledge-production economies, and implementation science. I am crafting a multi-sited dissertation project that critically engages aspects and consequences of custodial care for psychiatric consumers, survivors, and ex-patients who have lost (or “forfeited”), and are trying to recover, the ability to participate fully and freely in the world.
James Gibb (he/him/his)
Biological Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2021)
jamesgibb20126@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: James’ research broadly focuses on LGBTQ2+ population health, with a particular emphasis on understanding how social adversity, marginalization, and discrimination “gets under the skin” to influence variability in physiological function and patterns of health and disease among sexual and gender diverse peoples across their life‐course. As a queer‐identifying biological anthropologist, his research program is broadly motivated by his lived experience and desire to utilize his relative position of privilege to advance LGBTQ2+ equity and use his expertise in service to LGBTQ2+ communities.
#https://twitter.com/JamesKGibb, #https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James‐Gibb‐2, #https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=AUSP15YAAAAJ&hl=en
Cultural Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2020)
Regional Focus: Eagle Pass, Texas (Kickapoo Traditional Tribe of Texas)
sydneygonzalez2026@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Syd González is currently a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and a Mellon Fellow in Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern. They will research the embodiment of machismo among Mexican, Mexican American, and Kickapoo communities through material culture and performance. The methodology they will utilize is based on Linda Tuhiwai Smith's indigenous research methods in addition to collaborative, community engaged practices. Their research interests include queerness, indigeneity, borderlands, decolonization (but not as a metaphor), and what exactly a "Latinx community" is. Syd earned their Bachelor of Science in Anthropology from the University of Houston.
Archaeology (PhD Candidate 2017)
Regional Focus: The Maya Area (Belize)
KaceyGrauer2014@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: My research is about the relationships between inequality and the environment. Specifically, I examine how power structures and ontologies of landscape at the ancient Maya city of Aventura, Belize impacted commoners' and elites' ability to deal with drought. In my dissertation, I found that commoners and elites alike were able to access the equally important biophysical and metaphysical qualities of water, even at the height of drought. My ongoing research seeks to link archaeological research to present-day environmental justice concerns.
Archaeology (Doctoral Student Fall 2019)
Regional Focus: England
BridgetteHulse2025@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
I research agency and meaning in Medieval English graffiti. I use a combination of agency/resistance theory, semiotics, and buildings archaeology to analyze graffiti in context. I'm also working with the Center for the Scientific Studies in the Arts to employ various imaging techniques for my research.
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate Summer 2020)
Regional Focus: Middle East and North Africa (MENA); Europe; Turkey
seymakabaoglu@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Seyma’s research examines how people negotiate norms of ethical/pious finance in the everyday life of Islamic participation banking sector, in order to unpack relations of gender, class and ethnicity in terms of the changing political economy of Turkey. Her project explores the transformation of law and gendered norms of piety in the context of financial sectors of the MENA region, while highlighting previously invisible creative interpretative work Muslim women perform to create and maintain Islamic financial markets.
Twitter Handle: @seymakabaoglu
Andrew Kim
Linguistic Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2020)
Regional Focus:
andrewkim2025@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Sexuality/Gender; Race/Ethnicity; Embodiment; Intertextuality; Genre; Voice
Biological Anthropology (PhD Candidate Winter 2019)
Regional Focus: Spain
ElizabethKoselka2022@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Drawing from a broad interest in biosocial pathways that produce health disparities, Elizabeth’s dissertation research explores how social pressure to fit into society impacts young immigrants’ eating practices and health in Spain.
Biological Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2020)
Regional Focus: North America, Latin America and the Caribbean
keegankrause2025@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
Keegan Krause MPH, MA, works at the intersections of human biology, medical anthropology, and public health. Keegan’s work traces how complex social processes and structural conditions are embodied during critical points of biological and psychosocial development, and manifest in adverse health experiences through the life course. His prior work explored political economies of health, violence, and im/migration in informal occupational settings in the Dominican Republic’s tourism sector, and food security in the Sonora-Arizona borderlands. His current research explores the embodiment of adverse experiences during childhood and adolescence in im/migration contexts, and implications for life course and intergenerational health.
Google Scholar Page
ResearchGate Profile
Jackson Krause (he/him)
Archaeology (Doctoral Student Fall 2021)
Metzabok Valley region of the Selva Lacandona, Chiapas, México
jacksonkrause2027@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: My dissertation research focuses on systems of water management and ecological sustainability at the Late Preclassic Maya site of Noh K'uh, Chiapas, México. I'll be looking at the ways in which human-environment relationships are sustained in the rainforest ecosystem of the Lacandon Jungle, particularly as it pertains to water accessibility throughout the Preclassic, into the Postclassic, and in the contemporary Lacandon Maya community of Metzabok. I also associate with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research and am an advocate for non-exploitative community-driven archaeological heritage management within Indigenous communities. I have been working with the collaborative Metzabok Archaeological Project since 2016.
Archaeology (PhD Candidate Spring 2019)
Regional Focus: Ghana
ritakuma2021@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Dela Kuma is a doctoral candidate in archaeology. Her research broadly investigates the positionality of Africans and their embodied practices in global encounters. Dela’s dissertation examines how local notions of taste shaped the reception and consumption of new goods in the wake of the nineteenth century 'legitimate' trade in southeastern Ghana. Visit her website: www.rdkuma.com.
Paula Maia (she/her
Biological Anthropology (Doctoral Candidate fall 2018)
Regional Focus: The Tsimané territories in the Beni Department, Bolivia
PaulaMaia2024@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: My research focuses on the biocultural intersection of the microbiome and diet. Specifically, I am interested in how market integration alters diets and subsequently impacts the gut microbiota in the context of inflammation and aging. I address these questions using perspectives from foods studies, political ecology, and molecular biology.
Biological Anthropology (PhD Candidate Spring 2020)
Regional Focus: Chicago, IL, USA (original homeland of the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa people) and Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico (original homeland of the Totonac people)
MelissaManus2023@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
My research uses ecological and evolutionary perspectives to explore the development of the infant skin microbiome, with a focus on how social caregiving contributes to infant microbial acquisition. I use a mixed-methods approach that combines skin microbiome sample collection and detailed questionnaires in the field, microbial DNA analysis in the lab, bioinformatics, and social network analysis. I am particularly interested in applying my research to address the intersection of early life microbial exposures and global health inequities.
GOOGLE SCHOLAR: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=G3sQ_V0AAAAJ&hl=en
Kimberly McCabe
Biological Anthropology (PhD Candidate 2014)
Regional Focus: Cebu, the Philippines
kim.mccabe@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
Urbanization, Infectious Disease, Health/Medicine, Inequality, Environment, Youth/Children
Archaeology (Doctoral Student Fall 2020)
Regional Focus: East Africa: Jamhuri wa Kenya (Kenya) & Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania (Tanzania)
shelbymohrs2026@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
Shelby is an archaeology student whose research uses paleoethnobotanical techniques to study how and what people in the past were eating and their everyday lives. Her current research focuses on the historical foodways of city-states of the Swahili Coast. Other research interests include ethnoarchaeology and political ecology.
Twitter Handle: @ShelbyAnnMohrs
Bahram Naderil
Cultural Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2017)
Regional Focus: Indonesia
BahramNaderil2017@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: I study the ways in which a Muslim 'waria' (transwomen) community in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, conceptualizes the notion of piety. I am specifically interested in exploring the aesthetics aspects of piety, the spectrum of embodying specific forms of gendered-aesthetics within a given time/place of religious devotion, and how the warias negotiate piety alongside social/political/economic challenges in their everyday lives. From my preliminary research, I learn that the warias' views on the sociology and theology of the body/soul relations, their views on sex/work, and their beliefs in the nature of human-god relations are highly fluid, are never universal, but are in direct relation to their individual perception/understanding of what piety and wariahood/transness mean.
Archaeology (PhD Candidate Spring 2019)
Regional Focus: Central America, Belize, The Maya
Zacharynissen2015@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Zach is an anthropological archaeologist who specializes in household studies of the pre-colonial Maya region of Central America. His dissertation research examines the everyday lives of urban commoner households to assess the relationship between urbanism and inequality during a period of environmental and sociopolitical stress. He has conducted research at the ancient Maya city of Aventura in the Corozal District of Belize as part of the Aventura Archaeology Project (AAP) since 2015. As a senior staff member, Zach has served as the Aventura Project's Ethics and Diversity Officer and helped to co-author the project's official statement on issues of archaeological ethics and diversity. In addition to archaeological research, he has co-organized annual community engagement events with Dr. Cynthia Robin and AAP staff members, as well as the Institute of Archaeology and Institute for Social and Cultural Research branches of the National Institute of Culture and History in Belize. Outside of archaeology and anthropology, Zach has a background in feminist and queer theory and has designed and taught courses as a Graduate Teaching Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Twitter Handle: @zachnissen
Vanessa Watters Opalo
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate 2016)
Regional Focus: West Africa, Ghana, Togo
VanessaOpalo2013@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Economy and value; Social welfare; Anthropology of religion; Ethics; Catholicism and Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate Spring 2018)
Regional Focus: Western Europe, Belgium
houbou@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
I examine how the intersection of education, religion, and race in public schools shapes religious and ethnic minorities in Belgium. After the 2016 attacks in Brussels, the teaching of Islam in public schools in francophone Belgium has become a point of contention, leading to a growing suspicion towards teachers of Islam and a heated debate among political parties to remove classes of religion from public schools. Using ethnographic methods from fieldwork in Brussels, I explore the controversies regarding teaching Islam in public education as a way to examine the question of Islam in Europe today.
Aydin Özipek
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate 2016)
Regional Focus: Middle East & North Africa (MENA), Turkey
aydinozipek2018@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
My research is on the youth culturing program of the conservative AKP government in contemporary Turkey.
İdil Özkan
Linguistic Anthropology (PhD Candidate Summer 2020)
Research Location: Spain
MahmureOzkan2023@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Idil’s research centers on how language ideologies provide a basis for imagining nation-state, identity, and citizenship in Spain’s nationality offer to Sephardi Jews, five hundred years after the Spanish Inquisition. Combining ethnographic research and linguistic anthropological methods, her dissertation looks at how Spanish lawmakers, as well as Sephardic applicants to Spanish citizenship deploy notions of “language” and “culture” in attesting, negating and signaling national identity, lineage, and belonging.
Julianna Perez (she/her)
Biological Anthropology/MPH (PhD Candidate Spring 2018)
Regional Focus: Cebu, Philippines
JuliannaPerez2013@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
My research utilizes a biocultural framework on vitamin D production from infancy through young adulthood to investigate how societal practices and norms create and dictate the differing physical environments that women and men experience in Cebu, Philippines. By using the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey, my research delves deeper into the cultural factors and biological mechanisms that interact to contribute to vitamin D deficiency in both men and women in Cebu, a society undergoing rapid urbanization, which is vital to understanding the long-term health consequences of vitamin D regulation.
Jennifer Porter-Lupu
Archaeology (PhD Candidate Winter 2019)
Regional Focus: US
JenniferPorter-Lupu2023@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Historical archaeology; 19th and 20th century urban US; patent and proprietary medicine; health and healing; embodiment; sex work; queer theory; multivocality; public and community archaeology; marginalized and underrepresented histories; space and landscape
Ashish Premkumar
Cultural Anthropology (ND Fall 2017)
Regional Focus:
Research Content: The focus of Ashish’s research is on the issues of risk, stigma, and care associated with substance use during pregnancy. He has additional interests in the sociopolitical afterlives of biomedical studies, particularly randomized controlled trials.
Biological Anthropology (PhD Candidate Fall 2020)
Regional Focus: Cebu, Philippines
HaleyRagsdale2023@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
Haley’s research centers on the evolution of human pregnancy and the placenta. She is primarily interested in how mother, placenta, and offspring negotiate energetic investment, resource exchange, and immune tolerance in different environmental contexts. She applies a parent-offspring conflict framework to maternal-fetal communication and the regulation of metabolism in both mother and offspring across the life course(s). In addition, Haley uses an evolutionary, comparative lens to interrogate why humans suffer from pregnancy complications more than any other mammal. To learn more about her work, check out https://haleyrags.wixsite.com/research.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Haley_Ragsdale
https://twitter.com/bioanth_rags
Archaeology (PhD Candidate Spring 2021)
Regional Focus: South American Andes & Amazon, Northeastern Perú, Chachapoya
danielaraillard2024@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: For Daniela's dissertation project, she applies minimally-invasive archaeological mapping technologies to document, survey and analyze the geospatial and architectural components of Chachapoya above-ground mortuary structures. In collaboration with local knowledge holders and descendant community members, she uses aerial drone photography, GIS and participatory mapping to study these vulnerable, ancestral sites through sensitive research practices. Broadly, she is invested in topics of landscape, placemaking, human-environment relationships, Indigenous ecological knowledge, heritage, decoloniality, and community engagement. To learn more about her work, visit her website linked in the name above, her project website www.mapachachapoya.com, or follow her project social media @MAPAchachapoya on Facebook.
Cultural Anthropology (Arryman Scholar 2018/Doctoral Student 2019)
Regional Focus: Indonesia
FebiRamadhan2025@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Febi's research explores the struggle of Indonesian Muslims with same-sex attraction to redefine their sexual desire as a divine trial from their God and assert their agency to overcome this test in order to become pious Muslims. He combines microhistory and ethnography to look at the everyday practices of Islamic piety as it relates to sexuality. Through this research, Febi intends to unpack the intricate relationship between individual agencies, social structures, and divine entities.
Kaelin Rapport (he/him)
Medical Anthropology/MPH (PhD Candidate Summer 2020)
Research Location: Milwaukee (Millioke), US
KaelinRapport2022@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Kaelin's research explores the phenomenological experiences of penal supervision, the negative health consequences of involvement with the US criminal legal system for Black communities, and the dialectic relationship between racial capitalism and carceral practices/policy.
Key Terms: Health/Medicine; Inequality; Race/Ethnicity; Embodiment; Post/Colonialism; Biopolitics; Racial Capitalism; Surveillance; Carcerality; Temporality; Spatialization
Sari Ratri
Cultural Anthropology (Arryman Scholar 2017/PhD Candidate Fall 2020)
Regional Focus: East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia
SariRatri2015@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Sari’s reserach interest examines governmental intervention regarding child growth stunting and the knowledge-production embedded in that process, in East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. Her project intends to examine registration and record-keeping responsibilities assigned to local health workers apart from their already underpaid therapeutic work. Through this project, she is particularly interested to understand how dominant cultural ideas about health are conveyed when people talk about and reinterpret quantitative evidence collected from counting birth and death events. She receives funding from the Arrymans Fellows and Scholars, ISRSF Jakarta, as well as the Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP), the Ministry of Finance, Indonesia.
Archaeology (Doctoral Candidate fall 2018)
Regional Focus: Northeastern Andes, Montane Cloud Forest, Chachapoya
SophieReilly2024@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Sophie employs paleoethnobotanical techniques (the analysis of plant remains) to study ancient foodways. Her research specifically investigates the impacts of Inka and Spanish imperialism on food availability and access among Chachapoya communities in the Northeastern Andes from the 14th to 17th century. Her research investigates how communities and households developed strategies of food security to mitigate the impacts of imperial impositions while balancing food preferences. Sophie situates her research within current discussions of food security and food sovereignty and is exploring ways that archaeology can contribute to food justice movements in the present.
Twitter: @reillydigs
Roberto Rosado-Ramirez
Archaeology (PhD Candidate 2016)
Regional Focus: Americas; Mesoamerica; Ake, Yucatan
rrosado@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Roberto Rosado-Ramirez is an anthropological archaeologist with a research focus on the ancient Maya of Mesoamerica. His research examines how humans can establish settlements and regenerate community life amidst ruined cities in the aftermath of socio-political collapse.
Amrina Rosyada (she/her)
Cultural Anthropology (Arryman Scholar 2019/Doctoral Student Fall 2020)
Regional Focus: Indonesia
amrina@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
Amrina Rosyada is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology, Northwestern University. Her current research interest concerns the intellectual history of anthropology in Indonesia. Using historical anthropology, she looks at how anthropologists study Indonesia throughout history: from the era of colonial scholars to native Indonesian anthropologists. She is also exploring the sociopolitical causes correlated to this disciplinary shift and its impacts, especially in how Indonesian societies are portrayed and studied. Her academic essays have been published in The Conversation Indonesia and Inside Indonesia.
Aaron Schoenfeldt (he, him)
Cultural Anthropology (Doctoral Candidate fall 2018)
Regional Focus: Tulsa, Oklahoma (Creek Nation Territory)
AaronSchoenfeldt2024@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: My research examines the cultural and racial politics that manifest as civic leaders in Tulsa, Oklahoma attempt to transform their town from "Flyover Country" into a "World-Class City"
Archaeology (PhD Candidate Winter 2020)
Regional Focus: South Carolina Lowcountry (Kusso, Yamassee, Santee Territories), United States
EmilySchwalbe2024@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: My current research explores the relationship between water and inequality, focusing on how people use and experience shared waterways differently by employing 17th-19th c South Carolina rice plantations as case studies. To this end, my dissertation project examines the idea of a plantation waterscape in the Charleston area by combining terrestrial archaeological sites with underwater archaeology to understand how plantation colonies functioned. In this study I conceptualize plantation waterways and their associated infrastructure as connectors rather than barriers to investigate the ways engineered landscapes facilitated and challenged production, surveillance, and communication on and between Lowcountry plantations.
Twitter: @Salty_Archy
Instagram: @salty_archy
Anuranjan Sethi
Cultural Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2019)
Regional Focus: India
AnuranjanSethi2024@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Anu is broadly interested in the conflicts at the intersections of law, technology, and governance of the Indian economy. His research focuses on the transmutations of global capital as it negotiates the dichotomy of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ economies in the post-liberalization India. His current project is to understand the political economy dimensions of the Indian government's attempts to promote ‘new money technologies’ as a tool to tackle the problem of the black-money economy.
Cultural Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2018)
Regional Focus: West Kalimantan, Indonesia
hariara.simanjuntak@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Ara’s research tracks the legacies of colonial plantations in the Global South and how they emerge in the present both ideologically and materially. Combining ethnographic and archival research, he argues that deciphering the plantation logic remains critical to understand violent underdevelopment processes in postcolonial nation-states. This was made possible through the plantation’s ability to create and manage differently valued environments, bodies, and social relations, which, in turn, sustain capitalist accumulation. Ara is also interested in the political economy of financial systems, multispecies relations, and emerging forms of hope and morality among indigenous laborers in West Kalimantan, Indonesia
Twitter Handle: @arasimanjuntakk
Archaeology (Doctoral Student Fall 2020)
Regional Focus: Liberia, London
craigstevens2025@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Transcultural Black identity formation in the Back-to-Africa movement; African and African Diasporic solidarity via expressive and material cultures.
Cultural Anthropology (PhD Candidate Summer 2019)
Regional Focus: Brooklyn, New York (Lenapehoking)
StephenSullivan2016@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: What does gentrification sound like? My research examines the relationship between sound and politics in the context of rapid political economic and social change. Its methodology bridges traditional forms of ethnography like participant observation and interviews with soundscape analysis and archival work. The project calls attention to how narrow framings of noise in popular media and among policy makers miss the rich complexities of urban sound as a social phenomenon. Amid ongoing displacement, undemocratic housing and land policies, and heightened forms of policing, noise is a tactic of anti-gentrification dissent among Latinx residents.
Twitter: @sfsulls
Keegan Terek (he/him)
Linguistic Anthropology (PhD Candidate Summer 2019)
Regional Focus: Amman, Jordan
KeeganTerek2016@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
Keegan's dissertation research examines contemporary Arabic-language discourse around non-normative gender and sexuality - particularly as it shapes and is deployed in humanitarian work related to forced migration - through ethnographic engagement with LGBTQ refugees and activists in Amman, Jordan.
Biological Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2020)
Regional Focus:
elijahwatson2025@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Elijah's research broadly focuses on maternal and child health, with a particular interest in maternal stress, child growth and development, infant feeding, and food and water insecurity.
Biological Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2019)
Regional Focus: Veracruz, Mexico (Huasteco, Otomí, Totonaca, and the Olmec territories)
TaborWhitney2025@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content:
My research assesses habitat degradation and its impact on the overall health and wellbeing of endangered non-human primates. Specifically, I am interested in how shifts in the quality of the environment are reflected in hosts’ gut microbiomes and inflammation responses. I plan to expand the use of the gut microbiome as a conservationist tool.
Twitter: @tabor_whitney
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YuViXXEAAAAJ&hl=en
Jin Xiong (Portia)
Cultural Anthropology (Doctoral Student Fall 2018)
Regional Focus: China
JinXiong2023@u.northwestern.edu
Research Content: Jin Xiong (aka Portia) is a student of the PhD/JD joint program at Northwestern University. As a sociocultural anthropologist, she has broad interest in areas including im/mobilities, family, childhood, development, gender, sexuality, feminism, medical anthropology and anthropology of law. Specifically, her doctoral project looks at how im/mobilities shape and reshape rising China's childhood and family through the lens of the lived experiences of rural Liushou Ertong (Left-behind Children) in central China, and how global legal discourses such as human rights and children's rights unfold in poorly resourced rural communities. For her, anthropology and law are Yin and Yang (united opposites) in the sense that the former pushes people to explore the complexities of human life while the latter requires the art of "less is more".
