Tiffany Fryer

Research Interests: Colonialism, political violence, collective memory, heritage, race and indigeneity, time/temporality, materiality, feminist and community-centric research methods, praxis and politics in anthropological archaeology, hemispheric approaches to the study of the Americas.

Dr. Fryer teaches and writes on colonialism and political violence; research methods, praxis, and politics in historical archaeology and anthropology; and, museums, cultural heritage, and collective memory. Her research agenda focuses broadly on the durabilities of colonialism and other forms of political violence in the Americas. Employing methods and theories from across anthropology and adjacent fields, she explores how such violence, the things and places it generates, and the memories that result from its experience yield collective notions of heritage and sociopolitical consciousness across time. She has conducted archaeological and ethnographic fieldwork across the globe but her principal field research takes place in Quintana Roo, Mexico where she is a longtime member of the Tihosuco Heritage Preservation and Community Development Project—a community-based heritage initiative anchored by an interest in the history and present-day relevance of a 19th century conflict called the Maya Social War (or Caste War of Yucatan).

After receiving her PhD in Anthropology, Dr. Fryer held a Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University where she was also a lecturer in Anthropology and the Humanities Council. Recently, she co-edited collections on feminist approaches to archaeological heritage practice, reckoning with violence, and the archaeology of coloniality in the Maya Lowlands. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Things of War: Conflict and Heritage on Mexico’s Maya Frontier.

Dr. Fryer is co-counder of the U-M Center for Community Archaeology & Heritage.