Graduate Students

Kimberly Gonxhe

Kimberly Gonxhe is a doctoral student pursuing a PhD in Cultural Anthropology.  Her research examines how ancestral DNA analysis, genealogy and heritage-based international travel affect women descended from enslaved Africans. Her investigation explores reclaiming identity by utilizing mobility, precarity and race, liberation  and freedom, class, roots versus routes (diaspora/displacement), place-making, stand-point theory (positionality), epigenetics and history. Her research is positioned within native, anticolonial, and activist anthropologies, and is informed by Black Liberation Theology and Womanist Thought.

 

Degrees and Education

MDiv, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
BS, Ohio University

Alexandra Dantzer

Alexandra Dantzer’s dissertation research is an ethnographic study of insomnia in Belgrade, Serbia. She is particularly interested in the ways in which diverse encounters with sleeplessness map onto the broader experience of temporality of the late-capitalism changes in Serbia. In her research the changing politics of sleep, and the experience of people caught amid these shifts serve as a prism for investigating the connection between the macro-processes of economic and ethical change and subjectivity.
 

Publications:

2017, Architects of Happiness: Notes on the mindwork of migration, Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology, Vol. 12(1): 175 – 193.

Degrees and Education

MA, Social Anthropology, WWU Münster, Germany (2018)
MA, Ethnology and Anthropology (focus: Visual Anthropology), Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade (2015)
BA, Ethnology and Anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade (2014)

Awards

Klinzing predissertation research grant, European Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh (2020)
Award for the best MA Thesis, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade (2015)
Best movie (audience choice), Femix festival for Women in Art in Belgrade (2012)

Research Description

Subjectivity and selfhood, temporality, political anthropology, phenomenology, experimental methods in anthropology

Emma Messinger

Emma is in the 3rd year of her PhD in Mesoamerican archaeology. She is combining household archaeology, paleoethnobotany, and ceramic analysis to address questions of labor, ideology, and domestic decision-making. She works primarily with the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Program, and her decade of fieldwork experience has also centered in the American Southwest and on the Northwest Coast. Her interests include community-based archaeology, gender, identity, and ritual.
 

Publications

2020 Walden, John P., Tia B. Watkins, Kyle Shaw-Müller, Claire E. Ebert, Emma Messinger, Rafael A. Guerra, and Jaime J. Awe. "Multiscalar Approaches to Reconstructing Classic Maya Strategies of Ceremonial Inclusion and Exclusion through the Accessibility of Architecture at Lower Dover, Belize". In El paisaje urbano maya: del preclásico al virreinato, edited by Juan Garcia Targa. British Archaeological Reports, Oxford. In Press. 

Degrees and Education

B.A. in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeology from Northern Arizona University, 2015

Awards

2018-2019 Graduate Fellowship in Latin American Archaeology
Fall 2020 Graduate Fellowship in Latin American Archaeology

Ian Roa

Ian Roa’s research explores human – animal relationships in ancient Maya civilization using faunal assemblages from highly charged ritual contexts. To do so, he will draw on contemporary social zooarchaeological perspectives and on approaches revealing animal osteobiographies using isotope analysis. He seeks to understand how animals conceptualized in Maya worldview embodied a medium between nature and supernatural entities and, moreover, how their acquisition and ceremonial use among religious practitioners sought to deal with ecological fluctuations and political crisis through ritual.

Degrees and Education

BA in Anthropology- University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), El Paso, TX
BA in History- University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), El Paso, TX

Awards

2022 Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant
2022 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Short-Term Research Fellowship
2021-2022 Provost’s Dissertation Fellowship for Historically Underrepresented Students
2021 Society for Archaeological Sciences Student Research Support Award
2019-2020 Graduate Fellowship in Latin American Archaeology
2016-2017 K. Leroy Irvis Fellowship