Anna T. Browne Ribeiro
Anna Browne Ribeiro, a light-skinned Latinx woman with shoulder-length curly brown hair and glasses, is framed in front of red and white ceramic objects
I am an anthropological archaeologist with an interest in the historical and contemporary representation of peoples and places, engaged, socially-informed, and transformative anthropological practice, and the significance and legacies of human-environment interactions for thinking about the deep past and the future. For over a decade, I have focused my research efforts on Amazonia, working alongside and collaboratively with local and descendant communities. However, my interest in the various ways that humans encounter and make the world around them developed over the course of field-intensive practice in Amazonia and in other tropical research contexts, including Central America and the Pacific. I’m interested in anthropogenesis and multi-species relationships, and particularly in how legacies of a distant past, including anthropogenic soils like Amazonian Dark Earths and engineered landscapes, shape life in contemporary Amazonia. However, in all my research, I ask: what can we learn about human agency and our relationships with different members and segments of our surrounding ecologies through the study of remnants of the past? Can we harness this knowledge for a more sustainable future?
I earned my PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011, and since that time have been engaged continuously in archaeological and broadly anthropological research in Amazonia, first as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ohio, then as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi (MPEG) in Brazil, and, before joining the UofL faculty, as a Kluge Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. My collaborative research with Maroon descendant communities on the Lower Xingu River, supported by the Museu Goeldi and funded by my 2013 National Geographic Society Council of Research and Expeditions Grant, led to the publication “Rag-Time, Clockwork: Community work, time, mobility, and chronotope production in Amazonian Communities” in the journal Signs and Society. I’ve also published on my research on human-land relationships, as representation and as materialized in soils and sediments, in Latin American Antiquity, the Journal of Archaeological Science, Geoarchaeology, and the Archaeological Review from Cambridge and contributed chapters to edited volumes dealing with humans and the environment.
Roundtable: Beyond the Land Acknowledgment: Decolonial Actions for the Watson Conference and the University of Louisville
Date: Wednesday, April 21, 3:30-5:15 PM EST
Description: What does a decolonial approach to conference design look like? This roundtable seeks to help planners of academic conferences generally (and the Watson conference specifically) consider concrete ways to support Indigenous people, communities, and nations and dismantle white supremacist structures. Native scholars from several different institutions will share their experiences with conference planning and other projects; native and settler scholars from the University of Louisville (UofL), assembled for the first time, will begin the conversation about actions and initiatives that UofL might take and that the Watson Conference could advance. As they offer their perspectives, presenters will draw on their expertise in archaeology, geography, leadership and organizational development, linguistics, linguistic anthropology, literary studies, rhetoric, and sociology.