News
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.
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.
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,…
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.
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/
Congratulations to Lila Abu-Lughod, who has been elected to the British Academy’s Fellowship this year in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the humanities and social sciences.
Catherine Fennell's article about "deconstruction" and the practice of gleaning in Midwest circular economies, "A Forest Behind the Walls," appeared in History and Anthropology April 2026.
Rosalind Morris has received this year's Lionel Trllling Book Award for Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa (Columbia UP, 2025). The honor, established in 1976 in honor of Lionel Trilling CC 1925, GSAS 1938, is awarded annually to a member of the faculty whose book was published in the previous year and upholds a level of excellence commensurate with Trilling’s legacy. Trilling, a gifted and dedicated Columbia professor committed to undergraduate education, was also a public intellectual known for his scholarship and literary criticism. Morris receive the…
Jorge Rodríguez Solórzano has published an emergent conversation series for the online edition of the Political and Legal Anthropology Review, entitled “Indigenous Politics, State Relations, and Populism in the Americas.”
This Emergent Conversation for PoLAR Online brings together a set of contributions by Native and non-Native academics—anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and scholars in Native American and Indigenous Studies—to discuss shifting relations among Indigenous nations and peoples and contemporary populist movements, parties, and leaders across Latin…
Congratulations to Mara Green, whose book Making Sense (University of California Press, 2024), received a commendation as a finalist for the American Association for Applied Linguistics 2026 book prize.
The American Association for Applied Linguistics Book Award 'recognizes outstanding work in the field of applied linguistics. In bestowing this award, the association honors books that make an exceptional contribution to the field as a whole or to a specific area of specialization.'
The Anthropology Department at Columbia University is proud to announce the launch of its new Ruth Landes Program. This program is supported by the Reed Foundation, Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Anthropology Department with an initial three-year pilot that seeks to energize, deepen and drive graduate student training for anthropological work that combines innovation with a commitment to social justice.
The spirit of Columbia Anthropology alumnus Ruth Landes' (PhD 1937) trailblazing ethnographic publications on Ojibwa and Afro-Brazilian women and her scholarly commitment…
Rosalind Morris's article, Impasses of the Nation: The Practical Political Philosophy of Marcel Mauss, has been published in Grey Room.
Congratulations to Rosalind Morris, whose poetry collection, For Lack of a Dictionary (Fordham 2025), has been longlisted for this year's PEN/Voelcker poetry prize. The award honors 'a poet whose distinguished collection of poetry represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.'