STUDENT SPOTLIGHTS

Publications

Ariana Ávila

Ávila, Ariana. “Essential or Expendable during the COVID-19 Pandemic? A student-lived experience on grieving the unjust and early deaths of vulnerable populations.” American Journal of Public Health. 111, no.1 (Spring 2021) : 66-68 DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2020.306001

Cayla Colclasure

Westmont, V. Camille and Cayla B. Colclasure. “An Archaeology of Convict Leasing”. Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2023.2205688

Jordan Davis

Davis, Jordan. 2019. “Rapping Blackness”. Anthropology News website.

Julio Gutierrez

Gutierrez, Julio. 2019. Ecological Crisis: The Blind Spot in Migration Discourse. Society for Cultural Anthropology Hotspots Series Behind the Migrant Caravan: Ethnographic Updates from Central America.

Ampson Hagan

Hagan, Ampson. 2019. The political viability of anti-immigrationism. Africa is a Country.

Hagan, Ampson. 2019. Black Availability: Antimigrant Policies in Africa and the Exploitation of Black Migrants. Society for Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights section.

Hagan, Ampson. 2017. Algeria’s Black Fear. Africa is a Country.

Julio Villa-Palomino

Vargas, Nicholas; Julio Villa-Palomino & Erika Davis. (2020). Latinx faculty representation and resource allocation at Hispanic Serving Institutions. Race Ethnicity & Education, 23(1), 39-54.

Vargas, Nicholas & Julio Villa-Palomino. (2019). Racing to Serve or Race-ing for Money? Hispanic-serving Institutions and the Colorblind Allocation of Racialized Federal Funding. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(3), 401–415.

Awards

Parag Jyoti Saikia has been awarded the SAPIENS Public Scholars Training Fellowship for 2023-24. Offered by SAPIENS magazine, this fellowship will train anthropologists on accessible writing and podcasting for broad nonacademic audiences. The fellowship includes year-long workshops with science SAPIENS staff and science communication writers and editors from different newspapers and magazines. This is the 2nd year of this fellowship and the theme for this year is “Impacts of Technology”. This fellowship will culminate in 2 written pieces and 1 podcast. Parag will receive an honorarium of $2500 upon successful completion of the program.

Cayla Colclasure was awarded a spot with the Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities 2023-2024 to focus on ideas and activities to promote public engagement with the humanities.

Cayla Colclasure was awarded a spot with the Townsend Family Southern Futures Graduate Scholars 2022-2023 to participate and create a national conversation centering on the future of the American South. Arch - Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Awards (Arch-DDRI) | PhD Graduate Education at Northeastern University

Julio Villa-Palomino has been awarded an NSF DDRIG in support of his dissertation project, “De-institutionalization Unfolding: The Transition to Community Mental Health in Lima, Peru.”

Lucia Stavig has won the 2021 AAA David M. Schneider Award. This award is given each year to a graduate student in anthropology in recognition of innovative work in the fields of kinship, culture theory, and American culture.

Sugandh Gupta has been selected as a James Peacock REACH Fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year.

Cayla Colclasure received the University of North Carolina Humanities for the Public Good North Carolina Museum of History Cultural Festivals Fellowship to assist with the planning and organization of the museum’s annual American Indian Heritage Celebration and African American Cultural Celebration.

Ampson Hagan is the recipient of a Dissertation Fellowship at Boston College in the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies.

Sugandh Gupta was awarded the Humanities Professional Pathways Award (2021) for the Humanities for the Public Good Initiative for her project, “Designing an Enrolment Infographic for First-Time Substance Use Recovery Clients at the Opioid Substitution Treatment Center, Jammu, India.”

Francesca Sorbara was awarded the Humanities Professional Pathways Award (2021) by the Humanities for the Public Good Initiative for her project, “Mapping a Paradise Betrayed: The Challenges of the Rights of Nature in the Colombian Amazon.”

Francesca Sorbara was awarded the Community Engagement Fellowship (2021) and the GCPR Seed Grant (2021) to develop a participatory research project with a peasant community in the Colombian Amazon. The project has been co-designed with CEALDES, a Colombian research group supporting grassroots communities facing socio-ecological conflicts.

Ariana Ávila was awarded a Predoctoral Traineeship (2021-2022) with the Carolina Population Center’s Population Science Training Program.

Moriah James was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Award (2021).

Francesca Sorbara was awarded the Institute for the Study of the Americas (UNC) the Mellon Dissertation Travel Award (2021) to conduct ethnographic fieldwork research in the Colombian Amazon.

Ariana Ávila was awarded a spot with the Townsend Family Southern Futures Graduate Scholars 2021-2022 to participate and create a national conversation centering on the future of the American South.

Julio Villa-Palomino was awarded the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2021) from the Wenner-Gren foundation.

Sugandh Gupta was awarded the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (2019) by the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Francesca Sorbara was awarded the Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities (2020-2021) to develop an original outreach project screening the documentary Invisible Hand (2020) to raise environmental awareness among college students and the non-academic public in North Carolina.

Ariana Ávila was awarded with a Summer Research Award (2020) from the UNC Center for the Study of the American South.

Moriah James was awarded a Summer Research Award (2020) from the UNC Center for the Study of the American South.

Julio Villa-Palomino was awarded the Institute for the Study of the Americas Pre-Dissertation Field Research Grant (2020) and the Graduate Research Award (2020) to conduct research on Community Mental Health in Lima, Peru.

Sugandh Gupta was awarded the Joseph W. Elder Fellowship in the Social Sciences by American Institute of Indian Studies (2020) for her dissertation fieldwork.

Sugandh Gupta was awarded the Junior Research Fellowship (2019) by the American Institute of Indian Studies.

Ariana Ávila was awarded with a scholarship (2020) from the Lambda Theta Alpha Foundation.

Ampson Hagan has won the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship 2018-2020 (Niger); and the UNC Graduate School – Off-Campus Dissertation Fellowship 2018-2019.

Lucía Stavig and Hilaria Supa Huamán were awarded a grant as Leading Community Researchers (2020) for their project Mosoq Pakari Sumaq Kawsay from the Sovereign Bodies Institute.

Julio Villa-Palomino was awarded the American Anthropological Association Carole H. Browner Latin American Studies Fellowship Fund for Travel (2020).

Lucía Stavig has won the Helen Safa Prize, Gender Section, LASA (Latin American Studies Association) for her paper “Unwittingly Agreed: Fujimori, Neoliberal Governmentality, and the Inclusive Exclusion of Campesinas in the World of Women’s Rights.”

Julio Villa-Palomino was awarded the Society for Psychological Anthropology/Lemelson Foundation Fellowship for his summer research project entitled, “De-Institutionalization Unfolding: The Ongoing Transition to Community Mental Health in Lima, Peru”

Ampson Hagan has won the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship 2018-2020 (Niger); and the UNC Graduate School – Off-Campus Dissertation Fellowship 2018-2019.

Fieldwork

Jordan’s project explores battle rap as a competitive, artistic black space that serves as a site for the creation and maintenance of local realities

Isa Godinez fieldwork examinates the changes in the sociocultural and physical environment brought about by international migration and how these are reflected in human biology and health

Maja Jeranko explores how communities adapt to the newly-built housing settlements in the province of Manabí, Ecuador after the 2016 earthquake.

Julio Villa-Palomino‘s research focuses on the ongoing transition to community mental health in Carabayllo, Lima, Peru.

Undergraduates

ANTH490 – Race, Place and Violence: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

In the framework of the centenary of the Tulsa Massacre (1921), the students’ final projects comprised a podcast series, each episode in the series a work of individual student research about some facet of Tulsa’s formation and Black history, the Greenwood community, and the massacre itself in 1921. Find it all here.

ANTH89 – Blackness and Racialization

The First-Year Seminar Race, Racialization, and Blackness: A Multidimensional Perspective (ANTH 89), was designed to prepare students to think and talk intelligently about race. At the end of the semester students must demonstrate what they’ve learned, how their thinking on race has evolved, and what they can do with what they have learned. Here are several student presentations of their course learning.