Graduate Students

Olivia Paige Ellis

Olivia is in the first year of her PhD focusing on Mesoamerican Archaeology. She is interested in studying political structure, community, and the role of foodways on identity and social dynamics in Classic Maya society. She conducts research with the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance (BVAR) Project. In addition to her work in Mesoamerica, she has field experience in the American Southwest and worked in cultural resource management in the Pacific Northwest.  

Publications

2022 Walden, John P., Michael Biggie, Kyle Shaw-Müller, Anaïs Levin, Qiu Yijia (邱益嘉), Abel Nachamie, Olivia P. Ellis, Victoria S.R. Izzo, Julie A. Hoggarth, Claire E. Ebert, Rafael A. Guerra, and Jaime J. Awe. “Intermediate Elites and the Shift from Communities to Districts in the Formation of a Late Classic Maya Polity.” In The Socio-Political Integration of Ancient Neighborhoods: Perspectives from the Andes and Mesoamerica, edited by Gabriela Cervantes and John P. Walden. University of Pittsburgh Center for Comparative Archaeology Press. Accepted for Publication. 

Degrees and Education

B.A. in Anthropology from University of Arizona, 2019

Awards

2022-2023 Alfredo D. and Luz Maria P. Gutierrez Fellowship

Stanley Nwosu

Education
I received my BA in Archaeology from Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria and my MA in Archaeology from University of Ibadan, Nigeria in 2014 and 2019 respectively.

Interest

My research interests includes historical archaeology, settlements, cultural resource management, conflicts and museum studies, heritage.
My research seeks to examine how conflicts impacted pre-colonial societies in the forest zones of West Africa and how these societies interacted with their environments to modify aspects of their physical and cultural landscapes.

Experience
My first field experience started in 2012 and this marked the beginning of my journey in archaeological research. Over the course of my undergraduate and graduate studies, I participated in major Archaeological Projects in different locations in Nigeria including the Ife-Sungbo Archaeological Project, Old Oyo Archaeological Project etc. I was employed as a Field Archaeologist for the Edo Museum of West Africa Art (EMOWAA) Archaeological Project Phase 1 which involved collaborations from the British Museum, Cambridge Archaeology Unit and Wessex Museum UK.  I have also worked as a Contract Archaeologist carrying out excavations for PhD researchers in US and European universities who had their research areas in Nigeria. 

Luis Miguel Soto Rodriguez

Luis Miguel is interested in investigating the emergence of the chiefdom communities that inhabited the North Coast of the Colombian Caribbean, specifically those denominated as Tairona. Since 2017 he has been investigating the social and economic organization of the pre-Hispanic communities that inhabited the mountainous foothills of the western slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, such as the El Congo microbasin, through quantitative and qualitative analysis of databases in statistical programming language R and settlement patterns in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). He has participated in archaeological research projects in the Bogotá Savannah, the Pacific Coast of Colombia, the Basin of Mexico and the Mixtec Region, Oaxaca. Since 2019 he has worked as a project professional in Cultural Resource Management in the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, the Caribbean and Pacific Coast of Colombia and also in the Orinoco lowlands.

Publications

Vargas, J. C., Londoño, W., & Soto, L. M. 2022. Arqueología de la Microcuenca de la Quebrada El Congo. Santa Marta: Universidad del Magdalena.

Degrees and Education

BA – Archaeology - Universidad Externado de Colombia (2020).

ICANH / ANH – Data collection and analysis with remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems (2018).

Awards

2020 – Meritorious thesis entitled "Organización de la producción cerámica prehispánica en la microcuenca El Congo, municipio de Ciénaga, Santa Marta".

2022 – 2023 Graduate Fellowship in Latin American Archaeology.

 

Zixuan Yang

I am interested in topics around gendered migration, intimate labor, emotions, aging and sexuality. My doctoral project focuses on the affective experience of the Chinese migrant sex workers in Paris. I am eager to learn: how the Chinese sex workers experience ethnicity, intimacy, and citizenship as (il)legal migrants in France? Cautiously attempting to understand the vulnerabilities of the Chinese sex workers without falling into the ethical and normative debates on prostitution that build on a rigid binary between “criminalization” and “victimization”, I turn to the narrative phenomenology of “fear” to unveil what are existentially and ethically at stake in these women’s lives of migration and prostitution. Ultimately, I am keen to discover how Chinese sex workers sustain a sense of safeness (physical, emotional and moral) as they live through pain, violence, and moral breakdown.

Please feel free to contact me if you share similar research interests or you have any questions about my project.

Degrees and Education

MA in Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute

BA in English Literature, Beijing Foreign Studies University

Awards

Chancellor’s Fellow for China and Chinese Studies (Academic Year 2022-2023)

Leah Widdicombe

Leah Widdicombe is a sociocultural anthropologist interested in the anthropology of science and human-animal interactions in the United States. Her research focuses on “Animal Identity”: the ways in which each of us incorporate narratives of science and religion to form our identity around being a human primate. In her first publication, Leah investigated to what extent U.S. law and policy students consider themselves to be an animal, and how this identity might impact their concerns for nonhuman animals in law and policy.

Now, as a Ph.D. student at Pitt, Leah is interested in exploring the role that scientists have in co-constructing our identities as animal. Specifically focusing on animal behaviorists and primatologists in the United States, Leah investigates how culture influences the ways that scientists produce and utilize scientific findings, and how their findings influence U.S. culture and public policy. She questions how a scientist’s gender, religion etc., might influence their observations of nonhuman animal behavior; and how our human senses (sight, smell, time, etc.) used to conceive of alternate animal realities. Conversely, how do researchers’ narratives of “natural” human social behavior (altruism, competition, sexuality) inform and transform human identities, influence social norms, and shape our public policies surrounding gender, sexuality, or immigration?

Publications

Widdicombe, L., Dowling-Guyer, S., I am Homo Sapien: Perception of Evolution, Animal Identity, and Human-Animal Relationships among U.S. Law and Policy Students. Anthrozoös. https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2021.1926706

Degrees and Education

MA in Animals and Public Policy, Tufts University, Grafton, MA (2019)

BA in Animal Behavior, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN (2015)

Maura Anne McGrath

Maura McGrath is a PhD student in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests include affective labor, feminist geography, and urban nightlife economies. Her current research focuses on the embodied experiences of and intimate sociality within sunakku, an oft-narrativized subset of Japanese bars. She asks how expectations and performances of gender transform through inter- and intragenerational interaction, and how affective experiences within non-institutional spaces influence women’s navigation of a gendered social economy. 

Education

MA, University of Chicago, 2022

BA, Harvard College, 2015