Recent Graduates

We celebrate the achievements of our graduates. The career opportunities they have found after completing our PhD program are endless. Listed below is recent graduates from the program, and alumni are listed in the pages linked on the left. We are always excited to hear what our alumni are up to so please send any updates to anthro.grad.program@umich.edu.

2025

Yun Chen (Anthropology and Social Work)
Governing through Social Work: Making Persons and the Public in China's Anti-Drug Work

Gene Estrada (Biological)
Environmental Drivers of Terrestriality in Primates

Hannah Hoover (Archaeology)
Rooting Power and Place in the Native South: Yamasee Towns in Archaeological Perspective

Salman Hussain (Anthropology and History)
Migrants at Home: Gulf Migrations, Masculinities, and the Politics of Return in Pakistan

Reuben Riggs-Bookman (Anthropology and History)
Before, During, and After Emergency Management: Undemocratic Urban Governance and Fiscal Responsibility in Post-industrial Interracial Suburbs, 1971-2023

2024

Roxana Aras (Anthropology and History)
Orthodoxy as Way of Living: Religion, Sect, and Crisis in Lebanon

Yeon-Ju Bae (Linguistic)
Better Life, Better Nature: The Politics of Ethical Interaction in a Korean Buddhist Return-to-the-Farm Village

Andrew Bernard (Biological)
Primate distribution dynamics and the effects of contemporary climate change along an elevational gradient in Indonesian Borneo

Katie Berringer (Anthropology and Social Work)
Scales of Care: Reproducing LGBTQ+ Safety, Knowledge & Practice in Detroit

Kristen Conner (Anthropology and History)
States of the Sky: Meteorology and Rainmaking in Uganda, 1860-Present

Benjamin Finkel (Biological)
The challenges of senescence for adult male chimpanzees

Elliot Greiner (Biological)
Mammalian Paleoecology of the Tugen Hills Succession, Baringo Basin, Kenya

Vitalis Im (Anthropology and Social Work)
The Art of Negotiation: How Artmaking Practices Mediate Experiences of Violence in Michigan Prisons

James Meador (Linguistic)
Making Chinese Orthodox: Imperial Religion in Sino-Russian Contact

Swapna Nelaballi (Biological)
Exploring Fruit-Frugivore Interactions and Post-Dispersal Seed Fate of Large-Seeded Plants in the
Lowland Rainforests of Indonesian Borneo

Emma Nolan-Thomas (Anthropology and History)
Practicing the Prophet's Medicine: Health, Illness, and Islamic Therapeutics in Indonesia

Alex Norwood (Biological)
Novel approaches to ungulate enamel isotope analysis for the reconstruction of human paleoenvironments

Ronke Olawale (Anthropology and Social Work)
Ebola in Liberia: The Intersection of Culture, Care and Infectious Disease

Yeori Park (Sociocultural)
Tasteful Old Age:The Identity of the Aged Middle-Class, Nursing Home Tours, and Marketized Eldercare in China

Lauren Pratt (Archaeology)
Human Ecology in the Early Prehistory of the Eastern Andes, Peru

Richard Reinhardt (Anthropology and History)
'Subject in All Things’: Scenes of Conversion in the Capuchin-Franciscan Atlantic

Puninder Singh (Linguistic)
Linguistic Encounters: Language and Experience in Sikh Devotional Practice

Taylor Spencer (Biological)
Exploring Stress, Allostatic Load, and Disparities in Black Womxn's Reproductive Health

Kimberly Swisher (Archaeology)
The Averett Culture: Migration, Mississippianization, and Community Practice in the Lower Chattahoochee River Valley

Saquib Usman (Sociocultural)
Blindness and Water Divination in the Saharan West

2023

Christine Chalifoux (Sociocultural)
Betrayal and Belonging: Kinship, Ethnicity, and Cosmopolitanism in Kampala

Miranda Nicole Cosman (Biological)
Trabecular and Cortical Skeletal Correlates of Locomotor Ontogeny in Pan with Comparisons to Skeletal Variation and Adaptation in Gorilla and Pongo

Timothy Everhart (Archaeology)
A Study of Scioto Hopewell Monuments and Monumentality

Nina Francis-Levin (Anthropology and Social Work)
Meta/Static Ethnography of Adolescent and young Adult oncofertility Research and Practice at a United States Hospital: Implications for Sexual and Gender Minorities

Elspeth Geiger (Archaeology)
Power and Provisions in Anishinaabewaki: Re-Contextualizing Human-Environment Interactions During the Great Lakes Fur Trade

Randeep Hothi (Anthropology and Asian Studies)
Sikh Television: Sovereignty, Religion, and Diaspora

Sheng Long (Sociocultural)
Numbering Land: The Mathematics of Geography and Subjectivity in Agrarian Reforms

Martin Menz (Archaeology)
Re-Assessing "Village Life" at Hunter-Gatherer Ceremonial Centers: Occupation at Letchworth Mounds (8JE337)

Ashley Marie Schubert (Archaeology)
Tradition and Transformation: Mississippian Households and Communities in the Appalachian Summit, AD 1200-1600

Sharmi Sen (Biological)
Dispersal and Male Reproductive Strategies in Wild Gelada (Theropithecus Gelada)

Omri Senderowicz (Anthropology and History)
From Society to Community: Privatizing the Israeli Kibbutz (1975-2020)
Visiting Assistant Professor and Israel Institute Teaching Fellow, University of Kansas

Magdalena Zegarra (Sociocultural)
Growing Old in the Margins: Care, Social Abandonment, Death, and Possibility among the Elderly Poor in Lima

2022

Huatse Gyal (Sociocultural)
The Remaking of Home, Community, and Self: Rangeland Fencing, Resettlement, and the Resilience of Tibetan Pastoralists

Benjamin Hollenbach (Sociocultural)
All Are Welcome: Inclusion and Mainline Protestantism in the United States

Jeremy Johnson (Anthropology and History)
Literacy Unveiled: Citizenship, Nationality, Gender and the Campaigns to Eradicate Illiteracy in the Soviet South Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan) 1922-1936
Data Scientist, Glean

Ozge Korkmaz (Sociocultural)
Politics, Ethics, and Complicity in Turkey's Kurdistan: Anxieties of an Era

Jo Osborn (Archaeology)
Jahuay: Maritime Specialization in a Littoral Topara Community (200 BC-AD 150)

Adolmary Pena (Sociocultural)
Remapping Afro-Caribbean Landscapes: Embodiment and the Sensory Aesthetics of Dominican Tourism Space

Niku T'arhechu T'arhesi (Linguistic)
Endangered Words and Invulnerable Worlds: Spatial Language and Social Relations in Cheran, Michoacan, Mexico
University of Rhode Island, Distinguished Multicultural Postdoctoral Fellow

Dalen Wakely-Smith (Anthropology and History)
They Came Like Gypsies in the Night: Immigration Regimes, Race, and Romani Representations in New York City 1890-1960
Assistant Professor, History, Washington Univeristy in St. Louis

Yuchao Zhao (Biological)
Taming the Plateau: From Hunting to Herding in the Fourth Millennium BP at Meilong Cave, Western Tibet

2021

Anna Antoniou (Archaeological)
Collaborating for First Foods: Archaeological Investigations of Chinookan and Lower Chehalis Foodways in Willapa Bay, Washington
Andrew W. Mellon Native American Scholars Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the American Philosophical Society

Vincent Battista (Biological)

Senior Data Analyst/Bioinformatician, Clinical and Translational Epidemiology Unit, Massachusetts General Hospital

Andrew Foster
City Shoe, Country Sandal: Somatic Geographies and Kinesthetic Translations Among High-Altitude Quechua Athletes in the Peruvian Andes

Amelia Frank-Vitale (Sociocultral)
Leave if You're Able: Migration, Survival, and the Everydayness of Deportation in Honduras
Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer with the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University.

V (Victoria) Koski-Karell (Sociocultral and MSTP)

Following Water in the Wake of Cholera: Relation, Coloniality, and the Poetics of Osmosis in Haiti's Artibonite Valley
PhD, Medical Student, University of Michigan Medical School, Medical Scientist Training Program, Class of 2023

Kyra Pazan (Archaeology)
The Last Glacial Maximum and Acceleration of Technological Change in the Lesotho Highlands
Assistant Professor of Biological Anthropology, California State University - Stanislaus

Cheryl Yin (Linguistic)
Khmer Honorifics: Re-emergence and Change After the Khmer Rouge
University of California - Berkeley, UC Berkeley Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow

Sam Shuman (Sociocultural)

Cutting Out the Middleman: The Diamond Industry & the Politics of Displacement in a European Port City
Rabin-Shvidler Post-doctoral Fellow in Jewish Studies at Columbia & Fordham Universities

2020

Jamie Andreson (Anthropology and History)
Mothers in the Family of Saints: Gender and Race in the Making of Afro-Brazilian Heritage
Postdoctoral Scholar with the Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University

Abagail Breidenstein (Biological)

Populations of the Middle Nile: Using Bioarchaeological and Paleogenetic Analyses to Understand Nubian Ancestry
Postdoctoral Research, University of Zurich

Nicholas Caverly (Sociocultural)
Restructured City: Demolition and Racial Accumulations in Detroit
Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Massachusetts

Jordan Dalton (Archaeological)
Excavations at Las Huacas (AD 1200-1650): Exploring Elite Strategies and Economic Exchange During the Inca Empire
Kalbfleisch Postdoctoral Fellow, Richard Gilder Graduate School at the American Museum of Natural History

Adrian Deoanca (Sociocultural)
End of the Line: State Infrastructure, Material Ruin, and Precarious Labor along Romanian Railroads
Faculty Member, University of Bucharest, Department of Sociology and Social Work
Proquest Distinguished Dissertation Award, Louise Williams Distinguished Dissertation Award

Briana Doering (Archaeological)
Evaluating the Social and Environmental Process of the Dene/Athabascan Migration from the Subarctic
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Wyoming

Jessica Lowen (Linguistic)
Rescue and Revival in Detroit Anti-Sex Trafficking Ministry: How sex industry outreach and the fight against human trafficking is reviving American evangelicals

Aaron Michka (Sociocultural)
House, Church, Cave: Coptic Landscapes and the Demands of Pluralism in Upper Egypt
Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame

Sandhya Narayanan (Linguistic)

Spoken Differences: Negotiating Indigenous Contact and Gender in the Peruvian Altiplano
Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Washington and Lee University.

Nana Quarshie (Anthropology and History)

Bounding 'Alien Lunatics' in Modern Ghana
Assistant Professor, Yale University

Rachna Reddy (Biological)
The Development of Male Chimpanzee Reproductive Tactics
Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University

Amanda Respess (Anthropology and History)
The Abode of Water: Shipwreck Evidence and the Maritime Circulation of Medicine Between Iran and China in the 9th Through 14th Centuries
Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University

Sonia Rupcic (Sociocultural)
Righting Sexual Wrongs? Personhood, Intent, and Sex in a former South African Homeland
Postdoctoral Fellow, Brown University

Heather Tidrick (Social Work and Anthropology)
Roma Integration and Institutional Practices with Roma/Gypsies in Postsocialist Hungary
Social Worker IV-C, County of Mendocino

Nishita Trisal (Sociocultural)

Banking on Uncertainty: Debt, Default, and Violence in Indian-Administered Kashmir
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, University of California - Irvine

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