Graduate Students
 | Christian Brawner Background: In 2016-2017 I served as an English Teaching Assistant on a Fulbright in Amman, Jordan where I worked with Palestinian refugee students in a U.N.R.W.A. school. After returning to the states in 2017, I served an Americorps year at KentuckianaWorks as a research assistant to the Director of Labor Market Research where I worked on introducing Kentucky's first licensing guides for refugees and immigrants. Other Interests: Currently working on my masters in anthropology where my research interests include neoliberalism, Palestine, ideologies of security, and colonialism. When I'm not reading or writing for class or working with RSOs, I enjoy cooking and spending time with my friends and my adorable cat, Pim. |
 | Stephanie Dooley Research interests: My research interests include ceramic analysis, historical archaeology and GIS. |
 | Timothy Heine I received a B.S., Business & Economics from the University of Kentucky, then attended the University of Louisville School of Medicine where I was awarded an M.D. in 1988. Currently, I’m working with student colleagues Roxanne Leiter and Megan Duncanson, as well as faculty members Fabian Crespo and Christopher Tillquist, to develop a poster symposium for the 2017 AAPA Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA. I’m the newest [and surely the oldest] graduate student in the UofL Department of Anthropology. [I’d be that tall, lanky man with gray sideburns who frequently looks lost and addled in the departmental hallways.]
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 | Samantha Holmes Originally born in Louisville, Kentucky I received my bachelor’s in Anthropology with a minor in Atmospheric Science from the University at Albany- SUNY in Albany, NY in 2017. Here at UofL I am a first year MA student focusing on Archaeological research. My research interests include religion and ideological shifts in times of social and political transition as well as Ecology, Climate, Paleoenvironment, Pleistocene/Holocene Boundary peoples, Archaeology. Research interests: My area of interest includes the Viking invasion of Ireland particularly how the Irish responded to the new ideas being brought into the country and how those spread across the island. |
 | Amira Karaoud Research Interest: Evolution of Culture, gender, immigration and refugees, self governed communities and visual anthropology.
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 | Misty Lane Kupka Research interest: My research interests in the MA Anthropology program are: humanitarian aid, voluntourism and other service/learning abroad programs, environmental justice and political ecology, specifically development pressures and land dispossession. |
 | Jakia Marie Interests include: Immigration, Culture, Identity |
 | Zack Shelton My research interests are inequality, class, and culture, and I plan on doing my thesis on educational inequality in Appalachia.
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 | Dustin Smith
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Former Graduate Students | |
 | Neha Angal
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 | Charles Davis |
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In 2016 I received a Bachelor’s degree in English from IU-Southeast. I decided to take the writing skills I had developed and explore the social sciences. My interest in the machinations of culture led me to the University of Louisville Anthropology department, where I focused my Master’s work on issues of sustainability and the environment. I wanted to understand how various cultures conceive of the human relationship to the environment, why so many societies function unsustainably, and what impact sustainability efforts might have upon socio-cultural systems. |
 | Megan Duncanson Research Interests: My core interests include physical anthropology, immunology, bioarchaeology, paleopathology, and human osteology. My research interests broadly concern understanding health and disease in past populations, based upon both experimental immunology and bioarchaeological methods. |
 | Grace Ellis Graduate Research Assistant, MA Student |
 | Hannah Gabbard
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 | David Hoefer |
 | Emma Schoettmer I received my BA in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. I was a student athlete and 4-year letter winner while at Arizona. I competed at both the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Trials in swimming. I was a finalist in the 200 Breaststroke at the 2016 Trials. I am currently interested in the preservation and conservation of artifacts in a museum setting. I completed the internship option at the Grover Museum working with the Shelby County Historical Society in Indiana. During my internship I was able to learn how to accession artifacts into an online catalogue. I also created my own exhibit featuring artifacts from American wars dating from the 1860s-Present. |
 | Larissa Schroeing |
 | Tyler Short In December 2017 I had the honor of traveling to Rome for two trainings that involved nearly twenty youth from around the world. As a member of Sustainable Agriculture of Louisville (SAL), I represented the US Food Sovereignty Alliance (USFSA), a coalition of grassroots and grassroots-support organizations dedicated to realizing the human right to food sovereignty by ending poverty, rebuilding local economies, and asserting democratic control over food systems. |
 | Megan Taylor I received by Bachelor’s of Arts in Anthropology at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky in December of 2016. In the summer of 2016, I was fortunate enough to intern at Kentucky Refugee Ministry in Lexington as a Culture Orientation Intern. I was tasked with teaching and implementing cultural topics such as Men’s Health, Transporation, Mental Health, Immigration, and Police. These classes provided the refugee clients with a foundation of how to understand and interact with these institutions and structures during the resettlement process. Recenlty, I have been given the opportunity to substitute at Kentucky Refugee Ministry (KRM) in Louiville, where I teach adult refugees English on a variety of levels. These experiencea have led me to pursue refugee studies. I am pursuing a thesis option with a focus in refugee youths’ experiences through the acculturation and resettlement processes here in the United States. |
 | Robyn Valenzuela In the fall of 2014, I began my PhD program in Cultural Anthropology at Indiana University, with outside PhD minors in Human Rights and Gender Studies. My dissertation research examines transnational family separation and reunification between the United States and Mexico. This separation often entails the convergence of Immigration enforcement, child welfare, and Family Law systems, as well as institutional networks involved in transnational reunification cases. My study engages in ethnographic and archival research in Chicago, Illinois and Indiana, examining how noncitizen Mexican parents, child protection workers (in the U.S and Mexico), attorneys, and Family Law judges experience and navigate the child protection system domestically and transnationally. In so doing, it considers how bordering practices, as an effect of state surveillance and power, are enacted on families regardless of their proximity to the physical U.S-Mexico border. Ironically, this was a project I had conceived prior to the campaign or election of Donald Trump. However, this project has taken on a new significance in our current political climate. |
 | Research Interests: Socio-Cultural Anthropology, Archaeology. |