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Fall 2008 Courses (PDF)

Graduate Student Research

Pitt graduate students in the field...as near as Pittsburgh and as far as China

Some Current Graduate Student Research Activities

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In schools throughout Japan, March is a time for students to say farewell to departing teachers. In the Goto islands of Nagasaki, where graduate student Blaine Connor did his fieldwork, students and parents help departing teachers pack their belongings and clean their apartments, and bid them farewell at the ports with presents, flowers, songs, cheers, and music. Blaine's dissertation is examining Nagasaki's policy requiring teachers to accept transfers between rural and urban areas.

The relationship of primate cranial bone thickness to geography is of great interest to Annie Nagy because differences in cranial bone thickness distinguish H. egaster from H. erectus hominids. Annie spent last summer excavating early hominid locales in Koobi Fora.

Jamu is traditional Indonesian medicine.  Sarah Krier's doctoral research involves studying how jamu and its marketing relates to issues of sex, pleasure, and gender identity for Muslim women in Indonesia.  Her work will explore jamu as a syncretic representation of tradition, Islamic movements, and modern capitalistic markets.

Greg Indrisano's research includes a systematic archaeological survey centered on Liangcheng County, China. The goal of his work is to understand the affects of societal complexity and environmental fluctuation on agro-pastoral subsistence strategies from the Neolithic (6500 BP) until the Later Han Dynasty (1800 BP).

Lisa DePaoli's research concerns the use of the internet by the Kichwa people of the rainforest Ecuador. She is studying how the Kichwa use the internet to construct their autonomy, exert their identity through attachment to territory, and draw national and international attention to their struggle against oil development in their lands.

Kirk Costion is interested in political centralization, social organization, and public architecture in prehispanic Andean societies. His dissertation work will focus on processes of status and wealth differentiation in the Huaracane culture of the Moquegua Vallery, Peru.

Rebecca Englert is doing fieldwork in Japan to explore the motivations and experiences of Thai, Korean, Chinese, and Filipian women migrants to Japan. Many of these women leave their native countries, because, frustrated by narrow gender and lifecourse possibilities, they see greater opportunies in Japan. Yet, this is precisely why many young Japanese women seek to leave Japan. So what awaits those women arriving in Japan? How have their experiences changed their perception of themselves, and of Japan as a destination? To answer these questions, Rebecca will interview women in urban and suburban areas that have lived in Japan for at least two years.

Yi-tze Lee is investigating the cultural identity of the aboriginal Amis group in Taiwan, and the politics of authenticity via staged performance under the tension of Taiwan-China rivalry.  This summer he will be in Taiwan studying programming on the new Aboriginal Television Channel.

Christian Peterson is co-PI of the Hongshan Intracommunity Archeological Research Project (HICARP). He is studying how socioeconomic differences between households helped shape intracommunity relations and underwritten the emergence of social hierarchy during the Hongshan period (ca. 4500-3000 BCE) in northeastern China. HICARP is carrying out a 20 km2 'micro-regional' survey of a Hongshan period 'central-place' community in the Chifeng region of Inner Mongolia. Website link: http://www.pitt.edu/~cepst22

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Mary Polley is currently conducting dissertation research on domestic tourism and ethnic identities in the People's Republic of China. Her research examines the ways in which the use of tourism for economic development over the past decade has created new opportunities for Chinese citizens to revive and reinvent the diverse traditions of China's multi-ethnic population. Mary conducts research at Wutaishan in northern Shanxi province, traditionally one of China's four sacred Buddhist pilgrimage mountains. Today, Wutaishan is a popular tourist destination for members of China's Han Chinese majority and Mongolian minority. Her research shows that groups chose to visit Wutaishan for diverse reasons that are tied to differing ethnic, consumer and religious identities.

After excavations in Palenque over the summer, Lauren Herckis is planning a dissertation project to study social and ethnic variability in Classic Period Maya rural populations.

Narcis Tulbure is taking an anthropological perspective on money regimes.  His research will explore the shifting connections between money, morality and social relations as Romania moves from socialism to the European Union.

Large scale trajectories of sociopolitical change in prehispanic Costa Rica is the dissertation topic for Mauricio Murillo.  His fieldwork will include settlement survey in the San Ramon de Aljuela region.