Elizabeth Durham

Elizabeth Durham is a medical and political anthropologist. Her research interests include health justice (secular and religious), Global Mental Health, the politics of responsibility and of time, and the ethics of social science research and collaboration in clinical and humanitarian settings, with a particular focus on public psychiatry in the Republic of Cameroon. Durham earned her PhD in anthropology from Princeton in May 2022. At Michigan, Durham is an assistant professor of anthropology and a postdoctoral fellow in the interdisciplinary Society of Fellows."

Sherina Feliciano-Santos

Sherina Feliciano-Santos received her PhD in linguistic anthropology at the University of Michigan and her BA in Social Studies at Harvard. Her research is committed to the study of the relationship among language, identity, history, and social action among differently racialized groups and persons. She attends to the different scales of racialization and ethnicization processes involved in structuring identification and power in her research on Indigenous cultural and linguistic reclamation in Puerto Rico, on policing in the U.S. South, and on migration, citizenship, race, and ideologies of language and the nation among Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, St. Croix, and the United States. She is the author of several journal articles and of the book A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity (2021) published in the Critical Caribbean Studies series at Rutgers University Press. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren foundation, the American Anthropological Association, among others.  

 

Tiffany Fryer

Tiffany Fryer teaches and writes on colonialism and political violence; research methods, praxis, and politics in historical archaeology and anthropology; and, museums, cultural heritage, and collective memory. Her research agenda focuses broadly on the durabilities of colonialism and other forms of political violence in the Americas. Employing methods and theories from across anthropology and adjacent fields, she explores how such violence, the things and places it generates, and the memories that result from its experience yield collective notions of heritage and sociopolitical consciousness across time. She has conducted archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork across the globe but her principal field research takes place in Quintana Roo, Mexico where she is a longtime member of the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project—a community-based heritage initiative anchored by an interest in the history and present-day relevance of a 19th century conflict called the Maya Social War (or Caste War of Yucatan).

Irene Hochgraf-Cameron

Irene Hochgraf Cameron recently completed her MSc in Bioarchaeology in Durham England where she researched dimorphic traits in human skeletons and tested for biological sex by analysing dimorphic amelogenin peptides in tooth enamel. She is now in charge of understanding and inventorying the human skeleton and hominid cast collections within the department. Her main academic interests include variations of human morphology, human origins, juvenile bioarchaeology, and paleopathology. Outside of work she is passionate about fostering community, homesteading, and sustainable building. In her free time she is a Argentine tango dancer, fire performer, and fencer.

Benjamin T. Hollenbach

Benjamin T. Hollenbach (he,him,his) completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology here at the University of Michigan in the Summer of 2022. He earned his B.A. in anthropology and classics at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Benjamin's research focuses on the anthropology of religion, with a particular emphasis on contemporary Christianity in the United States and LGBTQ+ representation within Christian groups. Benjamin's dissertation - All Are Welcome: Inclusion and Mainline Protestantism in the United States - is an ethnographic account of three congregations in Michigan from denominations which have earned a reputation for political and theological progressivism. Each of these congregations have committed in some way to cultivating more welcoming spaces for queer congregants, though members' actions in enacting inclusive behaviors are varied and expansive. By focusing on how congregants conceptualize queer inclsion through a lens of Christianity, and determine which behaviors promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, he examines the ways mainline Protestants shape and influence queer politics in the United States. Conversely, he also examines the ways queer Christians construct their religiosities, and shape the religious institutions to which they belong.

Rijul Kochhar

Rijul Kochhar is an anthropologist and a historian of science whose research interests include transnational histories of infectious diseases, environmental anthropology, and critical theories of technology, disability, and rationality.

His current book project, "Science in Waiting: Antibiotic Resistance, Planetary Crisis, and Bacteriophage Futures," pursues interconnected sites in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, India, and the US, to explore how a “post-antibiotic era” is causing a resurgence of collective interest in once-moribund bacteriophage therapy.At Michigan, Rijul's research and teaching endeavors remain associated with the Anthropology department; the Doctoral Program in Anthropology & History; the Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS); the Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS); the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES); and the Society of Fellows.

Alyssa Paredes

Alyssa Paredes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Her research interests center on plantation politics, food and agriculture, and transnational commodity trade. Her work is based on ethnographic research in the banana-growing regions of the Southern Philippines, and on their long-distance linkages with Japan. Her book manuscript, currently titled Bananapocalypse: Ecologies of Plantation Capitalism in a Global Mindanao, draws on environmental and economic anthropology, science and technology studies, human geography, and critical food studies. It was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Japan Foundation.

Her work appears in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Food, Culture, and Society, and the Journal of Political Ecology, as well as in edited collections such as Feral Atlas: the More-than-Human, edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman-Saxena, and Feifei Zhou (Stanford Press 2020), and the Promise of Multispecies Justice, edited by Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender and Eben Kirksey (Duke Press 2022). She holds a PhD with distinction from Yale University. 

Lisa Parisi

Lisa Parisi joins us as the new Graduate Program Coordinator. She is just over the moon to be joining our community. Prior to West Hall, Parisi was a Graduate Program Coordinator in the College of Engineering and before that, she was with Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also an alumna of the University of Michigan, where she earned her Master’s in History. So Parisi knows these stomping grounds and the rigors of graduate school well. Outside of graduate affairs, she is a lover of animals (you will eventually hear about her beloved mutt, Woofie), she collects vinyl records, and is passionate about interior design, rock n roll, and historical fiction. 

Giulia Saltini Semerari

Giulia Saltini Semerari's research seeks to harness the Mediterranean’s rich archaeological record to reconstruct and model diverse aspects of culture contact. In particular, they are interested in understanding how small and large-scale socioeconomic dynamics affect long-term fluctuations in connectivity. Their work mostly concentrates on the interactions between Italy and the Aegean in the first millennium BC. While their PhD investigated long-term, large-scale patterns of exchange and migration between these two regions, more recently they have focussed on the Greek colonization of southern Italy, where they are conducting a multidisciplinary project titled Ancient Mediterranean Interactions between Colonizers and Indigenous populations (AMICI). A collaboration between the Universities of Tübingen, Leiden and the VU University in Amsterdam, it was first funded through a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship and later a Gerda Henkel Research Scholarship.