Tag: Department of Anthropology


College Establishes New Academic Minors

From the April 2015 Desktop News | Two interdisciplinary minors focused on burgeoning academic fields have been created and can be pursued by students beginning in fall 2015. The first, cybercrime, will combine classes on the technical aspects of thwarting cyber attacks and processing digital forensic evidence with classes on understanding criminal motivations. The second, Latin American, Caribbean and Latino studies, will allow students to explore the social, cultural, linguistic, political, economic and biological diversity of nations that make up […]

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Local Food Lectures

Dr. Eric Holt-Giménez, executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy in Oakland, CA, will present two lectures on food insecurity and local food movements on March 25 and 26 at 7:30 p.m. in Lloyd Hall, room 123, on The University of Alabama campus. Holt-Giménez, who has served as executive director since 2006, is the editor of the Food First book “Food Movements Unite! Strategies to Transform Our Food Systems” and has written several books on the topic. […]

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Campfires Help Lower Blood Pressure

From the December 2014 edition of Desktop News | A University of Alabama anthropologist has found that, consistent with anecdotal reports, hearths and campfires can lower blood pressure and likely played important roles in the evolution of the human social brain. Christopher Lynn, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, conducted a three-year lab-based study on the subject. In an article published in Evolutionary Psychology, Lynn discussed preliminary results from the study, in which he isolated the sensory aspects […]

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Blount Undergraduate Initiative Celebrates 15 Years

It’s a weighty question. What was the most important thing you did while you were in college? For a small group of students in UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the answer is often instantaneous and simple: The Blount Undergraduate Initiative. Although the four-year liberal arts program comprises a mere 20 percent of each participating student’s course of study, giving each student a minor in the liberal arts, Director Joe Hornsby said he hears the same message from graduating seniors […]

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Student explores Louisiana salt trade with archeological dig

You’d think that spending the summer at the site of Louisiana’s oldest French settlement would be nothing short of grand. But Paul Eubanks, a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology, tells a different story. Eubanks’s six-week stay in Natchitoches involved daily ventures into the swamps of northwestern Louisiana and ample amounts of digging as he conducted research for his dissertation, which will focus on the history of salt production in the area. Though he describes Natchitoches as a town […]

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Researchers Collaborate with Head Start

Can what you teach preschool students have lasting effects on them and on their family’s health and well-being? That’s what a group of University of Alabama researchers, in collaboration with Community Service Programs of West Alabama, hopes to determine. With a $2.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, the researchers have the potential to impact national policy on early childhood education. Their study will involve implementing a new curriculum and […]

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Students Named Fulbright Scholars

From the July 2014 Desktop News | Six recent graduates of the College were awarded Fulbright grants from the U.S. State Department to conduct research and teach abroad during the 2014-2015 school year. They were among 1,800 students chosen from a pool of 11,000 applicants nationwide. “For the College to have not one, but six students chosen for prestigious 2014-2015 Fulbright grants speaks very highly not only of these young men and women, but of the College faculty who have […]

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Summer Reading List

What are you reading this summer? Here are eight books by College faculty — plus the latest by distinguished scientist and UA alumnus Dr. Edward O. Wilson.   These books by faculty members in the College’s humanities and social sciences departments represent a tiny sampling of the hundreds of publications produced by A&S faculty each academic year. Baptized in PCBs: Race, Pollution, and Justice in an All-American Town, Ellen Spears In the mid-1990s, residents of Anniston, Ala., began a legal fight against the […]

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Anthropologist Awarded Fulbright Grant

From the June 2014 Desktop News | A UA researcher will spend the next year examining the resurgence of interest in Jewish culture in Poland with the goal of understanding the space Jews fill in Polish history. Dr. Marysia Galbraith, associate professor in New College and the Department of Anthropology, will spend the 2014-2015 school year teaching and conducting research in Poland as a Fulbright scholar. The grant supports nine months of research and teaching in Poland, though Galbraith will remain in […]

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UA Researchers Earn National Cuban Award

From the May 2014 Desktop News | Dr. Vernon James Knight’s archaeological research in Cuba has earned him the National Prize from the Cuba Academy of Sciences, a major national award in that country. Knight, a professor in the Department of Anthropology and curator of southeastern archaeology at UA, received the award for research he conducted at the archaeological site of El Chorro de Maíta in eastern Cuba. The international collaborative research project lasted from 2006 to 2012 and involved […]

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