Benjamin Ale-Ebrahim was awarded the College of Arts and Sciences dissertation research fellowship (2021-22) for fieldwork with LGBTQ Middle Eastern social media users in NYC. He was an intern at Microsoft Research in Summer 2021 and Spring 2022. He is currently working with Dr. Mary Gray at the Social Media Collective, studying how to develop inclusive software tools for sharing pronouns in Microsoft 365 products.

Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis received College of Arts and Sciences Dissertation Research Fellowship, the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, IU College of Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Travel Award, Graduate & Professional Student Government Travel Award, and Future Faculty Teaching Fellowship.

Mackenzie J. Cory received dissertation research grants from IU’s Institute for Advanced Study and College Arts and Humanities Institute, Infrastructure improvement grant from United States National Park Service to create a collaborative field school between IU and the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Nations at Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area. He was the lead author on the technical report “Preliminary Results of the 2021 Investigations at the Hell Gap Site.”

Eliza Frenkel was awarded a Graduate Fellowship in the Borns Jewish Studies Program this year. She also had her journal article published, titled “Installing a biography: The embedded pathway of the Last Address memorial plate in post-soviet Russia.” In: Contemporânea-Revista de Sociologia da UFSCar, 11 (1): 43-66. She presented her paper titled “Self(ie) Crisis: Taking pictures in Holocaust memorial sites” at the Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association Conference, Indiana University (online). Also, Nikolina and she will be presenting their co-authored paper titled “Waste of Commemoration: Touristic-commemorative Practices and the Invisibility of Waste Management in Eastern Europe” at the 28th International Conference of Europeanists in Lisbon this June. For this presentation, she received a Graduate Student Travel & Research Grant from the IU Institute for European Studies.

Eliza was a member of the Russian Studies Workshop at IU and a member of the Research Group on Body Art and Modification: Memory and Identity Workshop (a collaboration between the University of Manchester and IU) this year. Besides, she was also recently elected as an Officer for the Jewish Studies Graduate Student Association. For feasibility research she will attempt this summer on the topic of memory keepers in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine as she received the Sara and Albert Reuben Fellowship.

Ariana Gunderson will be conducting preliminary fieldwork on the German recipe industry this summer on a Council for European Studies-Society for the Anthropology of Europe pre-dissertation fellowship. She will return to campus in the fall as an Ostrom Fellow.

Moira Marsh serves as the collection manager and liaison librarian for Anthropology, Folklore, and Sociology. She was elected as a Fellow of the American Folklore Society last year.

Allison Marshall initiated into Phi Beta Kappa. She will be working as the Press Secretary for the Indiana House Democratic Caucus upon graduation.

Margaret Morley is finishing up her Fulbright US Student Award in Cairo, Egypt. She will write her dissertation with the support of an American Dissertation Fellowship from the American Association of University Women next year.

Tolga Ozata won the Harold K. Schneider Paper Prize.

For Ryan Edward Peterson, he has achieved the following accomplishments over the past year: He received Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Summer (2022) Research Fellowship; Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Academic Year (2022-2023) Research Fellowship; Midwest Archaeological Conference Graduate Student Paper Award; and Graduate and Professional Student Government Conference Travel Award.

Malia Piazza was awarded the “Common Themes in Reproductive Diversity” Pre-Doctoral Fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the 2022-2023 academic year.

Cristian Rene Ramirez received the Tinker Grant through the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. For Cristian, he could not have secured this grant without the support of his advisor and committee, Dr. Keitlyn Alcantara, Dr. Stacie King, and Dr. Daniel Suslak. He will use this grant to establish and narrow his research interests.

Rachel Seymour was a Virginia Smith Family Scholarship 2021-2022 recipient ($7,500). She presented at the 2022 Indiana Association for Institutional Research (INAIR 2022).

Catherine Smith was a Future Faculty Teaching Fellow 2021-2022.

Nikolina Zenovic, Kevin Laddapong, and Ariana Gunderson presented at the 23rd Annual Michicagoan Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Their topics are Serbian anti-mining protests, Swedish pop hits written in languages other than Swedish, and recipe theft, respectively.

Nikolina Zenovic has presented the following papers over this past academic year:

“#EyesonSerbia: Tracing the Digital Media Circulation of Protest Materials Against Lithium and Jadarite Mining in Serbia.” Paper presented at the Michicagoan 23RD Annual Graduate Student Conference in Linguistic Anthropology, Ann Arbor, MI, May 6th, 2022.

“The Intertextuality and Digital Media Circulation of Protest Materials Against Politico-Environmental Extraction in Serbia.” Paper presented at the Society for Linguistic Anthropology Conference (virtual), April 7th, 2022.

“Differing ‘Mentalities’ and Diasporic Erasures: Language Ideologies of Serbian Identities in Chicago.” Paper presented at the 53rd Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), New Orleans, LA (Virtual), December 3rd, 2021. 

“Papa Smurf and ‘Sviće Zora’: Citing Cartoons and Folklore in Protests Against the 2019 Montenegrin Law on Freedom of Religion.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Baltimore, MD, November 18th, 2021.

Nikolina received a GPSG Travel Award and REEI-Mellon Student Conference Travel Award for her presentation at the AAA’s in Baltimore last Fall. This summer she will be conducting pre-dissertation feasibility research in the Balkans. She will be exploring protests against lithium mining and extraction in Serbia, looking at the ways extractive projects are articulated by various actors and how those protesting such projects communicate their opposition. For this research, she has received a Skomp Feasibility Fellowship and REEI-Mellon Pre-Dissertation Fellowship. Moreover, she has received a Graduate Student Travel & Research Grant from the IU Institute for European Studies, a College of Arts and Sciences Travel Award, and a CES Conference Travel Grant for her and Eliza’s co-authored paper titled “Waste of Commemoration: Touristic-commemorative Practices and the Invisibility of Waste Management in Eastern Europe” at the 28th International Conference of Europeanists in Lisbon this June.