Anthropology Faculty
Dr. Valerie Andrushko published “Revelations of ancient head shape: Cranial modification in the Cuzco region of Peru, Early Horizon to Inca Imperial Period” in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology and "Health in the Inca heartland: A paleopathological analysis of burials from the Cuzco region of Peru" in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.
Dr. William Farley has had several publications including in American Antiquity, Historical Archaeology, and in the Bulletin of the Archaeological Society of Connecticut. He has also recently launched a public education project via a YouTube channel. Dr. Farley was awarded grants in 2020 from the Archaeological Society of Connecticut and in 2021 from the College of Arts and Science at SCSU.
Dr. Kenneth McGill has a forthcoming Spring 2022 article on basic income and political protest in Germany. The article will be published in Cultural Anthropology, the top journal for cultural anthropology in the United States. He also has forthcoming 2022 journal articles in Language Sciences and Transforming Anthropology.
Dr. Michael Rogers continues to co-direct a paleoanthropological research project at Gona, in the Afar region of Ethiopia. In 2020, he co-authored a paper in Science Advances reporting on the discovery of the smallest Homo erectus cranium in Africa, found with a mix of stone tool technologies. In 2021, he was part of the team describing the lack of sexual dimorphism seen in the canines of Ardipithecus ramidus in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And in 2022, he co-authored a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution that describes the Gona DAN5 Homo erectus cranium in further detail, putting the fossil in a broad evolutionary context.
Dr. Kathleen Skoczen was a social behavior change consultant from May 2020 - December 2021 on an applied anthropology project sponsored by Clean Cities, Blue Oceans, a program of the United States Agency for International Development. Dr. Skoczen developed research instruments, trained research assistants, supervised the collection of data, supervised team preliminary analyses of the data, conducted a comprehensive analysis the data, and authored the final report. The report, “The Plastic Crisis: Solid Waste Management in the Province of Samaná, Dominican Republic -- A Report on the Findings of a Qualitative Research Study on Household Waste Management and the Solid Waste Value Chain,” is published on UrbanLinks.
Alumni
Sydney King
In 2022, Sydney King was awarded the Barnard Scholar Award and earned the Outstanding Graduate in Anthropology award with a 3.98 GPA. As an undergraduate at Southern she was a committed activist, standing up and speaking out for social and environmental justice. Sydney volunteered on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and studied abroad in Chile in her senior year, despite the challenges of the COVID pandemic. On campus she worked on organizing students and implementing key environmental and social justice projects such as Save the Bees, the Food Recovery for the Community project, composting and gardening, and other work building ties with our local community. Upon graduating, Sydney was awarded a position with AmeriCorps and returned to our campus to continue her social justice work with the Office of Sustainability. Sydney plans to begin work on her graduate degree in Public Administration and Policy in fall of 2023.
Internship News
Samantha Tonan
Anthropology Senior
Heritage Consultants, LLC
Samantha has a paid internship with the private Cultural Resource Management (CRM) firm Heritage, LLC, based in Berlin, Connecticut. Sam is learning to conduct archaeobotanical analyses on samples from 3,000–5,000-year-old pre-colonial archaeological sites in the state. She is looking to begin a career in archaeology, either in CRM or the public sector and is also planning to pursue graduate work.