Northern Arizona University (NAU) is a public research university based in Flagstaff, Arizona. Founded in 1899, it was the final public university established in the Arizona Territory, 13 years before Arizona was admitted as the 48th state.
Barbara Myerhoff was an American anthropologist, filmmaker, and founder of the Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Throughout her career as an anthropologist, Barbara Myerhoff contributed to major methodological trends which have since become standards of social cultural anthropology. These methods include reflexivity, narrative story telling, and anthropologists' positioning as social activists, commentaries, and critics whose work extends beyond the academy.
Carobeth (Tucker) Laird was an American ethnographer and linguist, known for her memoirs and ethnographic studies of the Chemehuevi people in southeastern California and western Arizona. Her book, The Chemehuevis, was characterized by ethnographer Lowell John Bean as "one of the finest, most detailed ethnographies ever written." Her memoirs, Encounter with an Angry God and Limbo, chronicled her first marriage to linguistic anthropologist John P. Harrington and her time in a nursing home, respectively.
Regna Darnell is an American-Canadian anthropologist and professor of Anthropology and First Nations Studies at the University of Western Ontario, where she has founded the First Nations Studies Program.
Tanya Marie Luhrmann is an American psychological anthropologist known for her studies of modern-day witches, charismatic Christians, and studies of how culture shapes psychotic, dissociative, and related experiences. She has also studied culture and morality, and the training of psychiatrists. She is Watkins University Professor in the Anthropology Department at Stanford University. Luhrmann was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022.
Cora Alice Du Bois was an American cultural anthropologist and a key figure in culture and personality studies and in psychological anthropology more generally. She was Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Radcliffe College from 1954. After retirement from Radcliffe, she was Professor-at-large at Cornell University (1971–1976) and for one term at the University of California, San Diego (1976).
Louise Lamphere is an American anthropologist who has been distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of New Mexico since 2001. She was a faculty member at UNM from 1976–1979 and again from 1986–2009, when she became a professor emerita.
Joann Wheeler Kealiinohomoku (1930–2015) was an American anthropologist and educator, co-founder of the dance research organization Cross-Cultural Dance Resources (CCDR). She has written and/or edited numerous books and articles, including contributions on dance-related subjects to multiple encyclopedias, such as writing the entry for "Music and dance in the United States" in the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. Some of her best-known works are "An anthropologist looks at ballet as a form of ethnic dance" (1970) and "Theory and methods for an anthropological study of dance" (1976). An associate professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University, she was named professor emerita in 1987. In 1997, she received the first annual award for "Outstanding Contribution to Dance Research" from Congress on Research in Dance. In 2000, the CCDR collection was named by President Bill Clinton's White House Millennium Council, as something that needed to be preserved under the "Save America's Treasures" program.
Adrienne Lois Kaeppler was an American anthropologist, curator of oceanic ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. She served as the President of the International Council on Traditional Music between 2005 and 2013. Her research focused on the interrelationships between social structure and the arts, including dance, music, and the visual arts, especially in Tonga and Hawaii. She was considered to be an expert on Tongan dance, and the voyages of the 18th-century explorer James Cook.
Cindy Cruz is an urban ethnographer and educational researcher. She is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies at the University of Arizona. She is also a member of the National Association of Chicana/o Studies, the American Educational Research Association, and the American Anthropological Association. Her research looks at the embodied practices of resistance in homeless LGBT youth communities, violence and youth, problems in testimonio methods, and the school-to-prison pipeline. She is also interested in decolonial feminist theory, community-based learning, race and schooling, and U.S. Third World feminism.
June C. Nash was a social and feminist anthropologist and Distinguished Professor Emerita at the City University of New York (CUNY). She conducted extensive field work throughout the United States and Latin America, most notably in Bolivia, Mexico and Guatemala. She was also a part of feminist and working class social movements such as that of the Zapatistas in Mexico.
Monica Heller is a Canadian linguistic anthropologist and Professor at the University of Toronto. She was the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) from 2013 to 2015.
Leith Patricia Mullings was a Jamaican-born author, anthropologist and professor. She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mullings was involved in organizing for progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice as one of the founding members of the Black Radical Congress and in her role as President of the AAA. Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights.
Alisse Waterston is an American professor of anthropology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Her work focuses on how systemic violence and inequality influence society.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is an American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Patricia Zavella is an anthropologist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the Latin American and Latino Studies department. She has spent a career advancing Latina and Chicana feminism through her scholarship, teaching, and activism. She was president of the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists and has served on the executive board of the American Anthropological Association. In 2016, Zavella received the American Anthropological Association's award from the Committee on Gender Equity in Anthropology to recognize her career studying gender discrimination. The awards committee said Zavella’s career accomplishments advancing the status of women, and especially Latina and Chicana women have been exceptional. She has made critical contributions to understanding how gender, race, nation, and class intersect in specific contexts through her scholarship, teaching, advocacy, and mentorship. Zavella’s research focuses on migration, gender and health in Latina/o communities, Latino families in transition, feminist studies, and ethnographic research methods. She has worked on many collaborative projects, including an ongoing partnership with Xóchitl Castañeda where she wrote four articles some were in English and others in Spanish. The Society for the Anthropology of North America awarded Zavella the Distinguished Career Achievement in the Critical Study of North America Award in the year 2010. She has published many books including, most recently, "I'm Neither Here Nor There, Mexicans"Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty, which focuses on working class Mexican Americans struggle for agency and identity in Santa Cruz County.
Agnes Winifred Hoernlé née Tucker was a South African anthropologist, widely recognized as the "mother of social anthropology in South Africa". Beyond her scientific work, she is remembered for her social activism and staunch disapproval of Apartheid based on white supremacy. Born in 1885 in the Cape Colony, as an infant she moved with her family to Johannesburg, where she completed her secondary education. After earning an undergraduate degree in 1906 from South African College, she studied abroad at Newnham College, Cambridge, Leipzig University, the University of Bonn, and the Sorbonne. Returning to South Africa in 1912, she undertook anthropological research among the Khoekhoe people, until she married in 1914.
Carol Kramer was an American archaeologist known for conducting ethnoarchaeology research in the Middle East and South Asia. Kramer also advocated for women in anthropology and archaeology, receiving the Squeaky Wheel Award from the Committee on the Status of Women in Anthropology in 1999. Kramer co-wrote Ethnoarchaeology in Action (2001) with Nicolas David, the first comprehensive text on ethnoarchaeology, and received the Award for Excellence in Archaeological Analysis posthumously in 2003.
Margery Wolf was an American anthropologist, writer, scholar, and feminist activist. She published numerous ethnographic works that brought her attention in China and the U.S. and played a formative role in anthropology.
Aimee Meredith Cox is an American cultural anthropologist, former dancer, and choreographer.
