In Anthropology It's ALL About Research
Here Are Some of the Things Being Studied at FAU:
(Scroll To The Sections For Archaeology, Biological (Physical) Anthropology and Cultural Anthropology)
ARCHAEOLOGY
Dr. Arlene Fradkin
My major area of expertise is zooarchaeology, the study of animal bone and shell remains recovered from archaeological sites. As a branch of environmental archaeology, this discipline is directed toward understanding the dynamic relationship between past human populations and the natural and social environment in which they lived.
Anthony Saturno
My research interest is ethnoarchaeology, specifically ancient civilizations, architecture and social structure. My studies will be greatly assisted by my travels to Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan, Australia, Jamaica, Haiti, Mexico, Costa Rica and most of the Caribbean islands.
Crystal Geiger
My research interests center on historical archaeology, and particularly themes of continuity in frontier sites. The collection for my thesis is from a known historic campsite, circa 1890's, in downtown Ft. Lauderdale, Fl. I am interested in looking at the interplay of market forces and environmental realities in the early social and economic development of Ft. Lauderdale. Through an analysis of the cultural materials and the documentary evidence, I hope to reach an understanding of the complexities and anxieties of early frontier life in South Florida.
Kassandra Nelson
I am interested in applying a biocultural approach to the understanding of past cultures. As a bioarchaeologist, I examine human remains to understand and describe diet, health, and cultural practices. My research has included forensic investigations, preservation analyses, and burial practices.
Timothy Guyah
My current research revolves around Aztec culture, language and lithics. I would like to describe Aztec artifacts in Nahuatl and reconstruct typologies based on their emic perspective. My thesis is creating a typology of Formal Aztec stone tools. This is a theory generating thesis that I hope will provide a fresh perspective to the field.
Dr. Clifford Brown
Most of my research and experience in archaeology focuses geographically on the culture area called Mesoamerica, which encompasses central and eastern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and western Honduras.
Recently, I began survey and excavations in northwest Nicaragua. My research interests include the origins of civilization, particularly the emergence of inequality and social complexity; ceramic analysis; lithic analysis; and the application of quantitative methods in archaeology, especially fractal analysis.
BIOLOGICAL (PHYSICAL) ANTHROPOLOGY
Kendra Philmon
I am a first year graduate student and I am specifically interested in biological anthropology, bioarchaeology, osteology and paleopathology. In using a biocultural approach, my aim is to examine populations, and the integral relationship between disease and culture. Some pathological interests of mine include ankylosing spondylitis, the wide array of arthritic conditions, treponemal infections, and tuberculosis.
Melissa Boas
I am interested in the evolution of cognitive abilities and language. Evolution is a fascinating topic to me and I would like to contribute to our understanding of the selective pressures that led to the complex human brain. I want to study the origins of language because I believe language is vital to the expression and transmission of culture.
Sarah Lynn Redding
My interest is the variation of cervical vertebrae across human populations and the application of this knowledge within the areas of language evolution and forensic anthropology. I have researched the possibility of physical adaptations within humans for musical abilities and will further my research while collecting measurements on cervical vertebrae from museums across the US and Europe.
Dr. Douglas Broadfield
My research focuses on the evolution of the human brain. My approach is to examine all forms of evidence. The primary method of looking at human brain evolution is to look at the human fossil record.
My second area of research involves comparative neuroanatomy, which involves direct comparison of the brains of humans to other primates. Of the greatest importance here is what we can learn from the brains of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. With access to a large collection of ape brains we are beginning to understand where changes in the brain may have occurred since the last common ancestor of chimps and humans.
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Dr. Max Kirsch
Most of my work as an anthropologist has been economic and political anthropology, globalism, the anthropology of work and the anthropology of gender, as well as human rights and issues of peace and justice. In doing this, my focus contains questions of the meaning and generation of theory and their consequences on the analysis of local populations in global settings, as well as the analysis of the individual in society.
Adam Slotnick
My research focuses on physical culture. My approach is to study physically active populations looking for the interplay of cultural, psychological and biological factors which produce healthy outcomes. This knowledge will be used to create applied solutions for health promotion. My other areas of research are food culture and popular culture representations of both physical and food culture.
Alexi Velez
My anthropological interests are primarily cultural and linguistic. I am interested in the anthropology of ideology and ritual and how literary postmodernism or deconstructionism helps to understand the linguistic binaries within cultures and religions. Foci I am considering for my thesis are understanding the gender binary in the Romani tradition; the ecstatic state: how aboriginal people of the Amazon commune with spirits and deities through the use of psychotropic substances, ritual sex and dance; the commodification of magic: fortune telling in the Romani diaspora.
Tara Sprague
I am a second year graduate student from Oregon studying cultural anthropology. The focus of my research is psychological anthropology; my thesis researches the achievement motivation among second generation Guatemalan Mayan children and adolescents. I am interested in the confliction of culture these individuals face as their parents are still very much Guatemalan Mayan, while they are being raised in the US.
Patrick Nason
My subfield is cultural anthropology with a focus on political ecology, environment, American elites, power and the anthropology of disasters. My research interests include applied anthropology for ocean conservation, exploration of the cultural foundations of overfishing, shark-finning and whaling, the ethnography of American elites and the study of (un)natural disasters and power.
Matthew Gardner
Although my thesis involves the application of fractal analysis on Maya artwork to gain quantitative measures of previously qualitative work, I find it difficult to focus on just one subject. I also like to research in methods and the study of food. For the FAU Anthropology Department's Florida Public Archaeology Network-Southeast Center I am working on a project that integrates learning about Floridian history with its food use, showing how past peoples created and combined the materials that comprised their subsistence.
Dr. Michael Harris
My work in anthropology is motivated by my interest in making anthropology relevant to contemporary social problems. In general, I am most interested in how anthropology can be used to address such disparate issues as health and disease patterns, inequality, and environmental degradation. Most of my work has focused on the human-environment interaction, particularly examining how people use land in subsistence practices, how access to land changes over the course of a household’s life cycle, and through inheritance practices. From this basic focus on land use, my research extends out to economic and political processes as well as issues of health and illness (especially childhood disease and mortality).
