Congratulations to anthropology faculty Dr. Sarah Willen, Dr. Gideon Hartman, and Dr. Kroum Batchvarov, who have been promoted to tenured Associate Professors. UCONN’s Board of Trustees approved all promotions on Wednesday, April 26, 2017.
Month: April 2017
Elic Weitzel Co-Winner of 2017 SAA Student Poster Award
Congratulations to archaeology graduate student, Elic Weitzel for winning the Society of American Archaeology’s prestigious 2017 Student Poster Award with his co-author Daniel Plekhov from Brown University at the Annual Meeting in Vancouver, BC. Their poster was entitled Contact-Period Settlement Changes in Eastern North America: A Test of the Ideal Free and Ideal Despotic Distribution Models.
José E. Hasemann Awarded IAF Fellowship for Field Research
Congratulations to José Enrique Hasemann, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Anthropology at UCONN, for receiving an Inter-American Foundation Grassroots Development Field Research Fellowship! José’s project will investigate prevention practices for the Aedes aegypti mosquito in Tegucigalpa, Honduras where the vector is associated with the spread of dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. Formative research in low-income neighborhoods in Honduras indicates that public health programs targeting mosquito-borne diseases focus on perceived inherent characteristics of target populations and implicitly tend to blame the affected populations for the spread of disease. This study will examine 1) local perceptions of mosquito-borne disease; 2) discourse of public health interventions for mosquito-borne diseases; 3) residents’ views of intervention programs and local conditions of life; 4) interactions between public health agents and local populations. This study will provide insight into how individuals affected by the Ae. aegypti vector make sense of the conditions that predispose them to infection and incorporate prevention messages into their daily lives. The anthropological focus of this research will contribute to integrated vector management approaches and new ways of understanding how individuals think about their health and their lives in relation to vector-borne disease throughout the year, when epidemics are not taking place and public health surveillance is minimal.
Anne Kohler Awarded NSF Grant for Dissertation Research
Anne Kohler, a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at UCONN, has been awarded a prestigious dissertation research grant from the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program. Kohler’s doctoral research, which is anchored in the Down Syndrome Program of a major hospital in the Northeastern U.S., investigates the moral lives of people with intellectual disability including, in particular, their experiences of health, clinical encounters, and care. In addition to her own NSF-funded ethnographic research, Kohler will also collaborate with researchers at Harvard Medical School and Simpson College to design and implement a national survey of Down Syndrome, health inequities, and healthcare access. Many congratulations, Anne!
