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Read stories and articles for and about current and prospective students and faculty in the Anthropology program.
Recent News
Jan 17, 2023
Fulbright Allows Anthropology Ph.D. Candidate to Study in Guatemala
Lilianna Quiroa-Crowell will conduct research for a dissertation on Indigenous women in the neglected city of Puerto Barrios.
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Dec 26, 2022
Make 2023 Productive and Fulfilling with These Academic Resolutions
From securing funding to taking time to enjoy the music, the Graduate Center offers support to help you reach your goals in 2023.
Dec 14, 2022
10 Riveting Science Stories From 2022
Graduate Center faculty, students, and alumni blaze red-hot trails in science.
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Dec 8, 2022
Outside of the Academy: Alumni Share Advice on Launching Unexpected Careers
In recent years many Graduate Center alumni have parlayed their degrees into challenging and rewarding careers in the nonacademic world.
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Anthropology Books

Why Public Space Matters
Public spaces -- where people from all walks of life play, work, meet, talk, read, think, debate, and protest -- are vital to a healthy civic life. And, as the eminent scholar of public space Setha Low argues in Why Public Space Matters, even fleeting moments of visibility and encounter in these spaces tend to foster a broader worldview and our willingness to accept difference. Such experiences also enhance flexible thinking, problem solving, creativity, and inclusiveness. There are many such spaces, but they all enhance social life. Sidewalks and plazas offer business opportunities for small-scale entrepreneurs who cannot afford store space. Public parks have long provided major cultural attractions, from plays to concerts, at little or no cost to the public. Central squares have a storied tradition as arenas for demonstrations and political protests. Parks and waterways create sustainable greenways, and during disasters, all manner of public spaces become centers for food delivery and shelter. To illustrate their value, Low draws from decades of research in public spaces across the Americas, from New York to Costa Rica.
Published December 2022
Oxford University Press

The Ends of Paradise
Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras
The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher A. Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. Using a combination of participant observation, courtroom ethnography, and archival research, Loperena reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority. The book offers a trenchant analysis of the ways Black dispossession and displacement are carried forth through the conferral of individual rights and freedoms, a prerequisite for resource exploitation under contemporary capitalism.
Published November 2022
Stanford University Press

At Home in Roman Egypt: A Social Archaeology
Cambridge University Press, 2021
What was life like for ordinary people who lived in Roman Egypt? In this volume, Anna Lucille Boozer reconstructs and examines the everyday lives of non-elite individuals. It is the first book to bring a 'life course' approach to the study of Roman Egypt and Egyptology more generally. Based on evidence drawn from objects, portraits, and letters, she focuses on the quotidian details that were most meaningful to those who lived during the centuries of Roman occupation. Boozer explores these individuals through each phase of the life cycle — from conception, childbirth, childhood, and youth, to adulthood and old age — and focuses on essential themes such as religion, health, disability, death, and the afterlife. Illuminating the lives of people forgotten by most historians, her richly illustrated volume also shows how ordinary people experienced and enacted social and cultural change.
Published December 2021