Congratulations to Jorge Alejandro Rodríguez Solórzano for winning this year's Étienne Balibar Prize in Cultural and Political Thought, sponsored by the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. The prize has been conferred on Jorge for his essay, 'An Oral History of Ayuuk/ Mixe Political Concepts.'
The Department of Anthropology pays tribute to former student Daniel West, and remembers his passionate intellectual journey. Click here for the full story/
Rosalind Morris has been named co-winner of AES Senior Book Prize, awarded by the American Ethnological Society every two years. Morris shares this year's prize, for Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa (Columbia University Press, 2025), with Danilyn Rutherford. Read about the prize here.
Claudio Lomnitz interrogates the return of slavery, or forced labor, to Mexico and asks why the government is not acting to combat it, in an opinion piece for the Boston Review. Read the article here.
The Department is proud and delighted to share news that our PhD student, Alex McDougle, was recently interviewed by Smiti Nathan, an archaeologist and public educator, on her video podcast, Curiosity Meets the Past.
This episode is part of the Independent Media Initiative's 50x50 Science Across America project, which selected one creator from each state (Nathan) to interview a scientist (Alex) who they think is doing groundbreaking work. For this national series, the Independent Media Initiative collaborated with HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation,…
The department congratulates Vanessa Agard-Jones on receiving a Wenner-Gren grant to support research on her project, Low Tide: Black Intertidal Ecologies on the Atlantic Seaboard. The grant will support her field research along the intertidal zone from the Chesapeake to Maine, and will form the basis for a planned third volume in her trilogy on toxicity and black life in the postcolonial Atlantic world.
Having completed their coursework, theses, internships, and end-of-year exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, the following students will graduate this month from the Museum Anthropology MA Program (October 2026):
Susie Anthony, Brandon Chavez, Megan Connoley, Annika Dillon, Yixiao Duan, Izetta Evans, Yijun (Yvonne) Gu, Sarah Palluconi, Amanda (Mandy) Porter, Shuang (Stephanie) Wu.