This year we welcomed two new faculty members.  Ryan Kennedy is a zooarchaeologist who serves as the Director of the William R Adams Zooarchaeology Laboratory, which houses an impressive comparative collection for faunal analyses.  Carlton Shield Chief Gover is a new tenure track faculty member in archaeology, who also serves as Curator of Public Archaeology at the IU Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (IUMAA).   This fall we look forward to welcoming Fumi Arakawa, an archaeologist who works in the Southwest and who will split his appointment between the Anthropology Department and the IUMAA as Associate Director for Research.  We will also welcome Jennifer Cullin as a Lecturer in Anthropology and Human Biology in fall 2023.  Jennifer is a graduate of the Anthropology PhD program and a bioanthropologist who works on the interrelationships between variation in body size and body size norms.

As we welcome new faculty members, we also say goodbye to Phil Lesourd, who is retiring after twenty five years as a faculty member in Anthropology and Second Language Studies.  Dan Suslak and Kate Graber now hold down the linguistic anthropology curriculum and we are hoping to hire a new faculty member to allow us to continue to offer a robust curriculum in this longstanding departmental area of expertise.

In December 2022 our long-serving Anthropology Office Manager, Stephanie Odaffer, left and is now taking a position at University of Miami!  We wish her well in her new position and location (the beach!), and simultaneously welcome Casey Green, who was formerly the Administrative Assistant in the Human Biology Program, closely affiliated with Anthropology.  Casey received her BS in Environmental Science from IU in 2020, and so her interests dovetail nicely with Anthropology.  She is actively involved in animal rescue efforts in Bloomington, including serving as a foster parent for one of the Carolina dogs rescued from a local hoarding situation.  She works closely with local girl scout groups as well.  We are delighted to have Casey as part of the Anthropology office community.

This year we also celebrated our senior Anthropology majors with an awards luncheon at the IMU Tudor Room, and then awards and milestones for all departmental members at an end-of-year reception in the Federal Room at IMU.   Our graduate students were exceptionally successful in garnering awards at IU and beyond, and we celebrate them!  They also held their first in person AGSA Skomp Research Symposium in March 2023, featuring graduate student research and dovetailing with our PhD student recruitment visit.  Assistant Professor Ryan Kennedy gave the keynote address.

In 2022-2023 we graduated our first cohort of Food Studies MA students, and welcomed two new Food Studies MA students to the program!  The MA project of one of our graduates, Kaeley Geschke, on food waste was featured in IU Bloomington Today.  Other graduates include Jerry Hernandez, Erin Hosein, and Lewis Hughes.  Congratulations!  

This is my last contribution to the newsletter as Department Chair.  I have served in this role since January 2020, and it has been an eventful chair term for sure.  It has been an honor and a privilege to serve the department in this capacity. I am looking forward to some time away from administration and a renewed focus on my own research.  The department will be in excellent hands under the incoming chair, Professor Stacie King, starting July 1, 2023.

With all best wishes,

Andrea Wiley
Professor and Chair, Anthropology