Penn Museum, formerly known as The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, is an archaeology and anthropology museum at the University of Pennsylvania. It is located on Penn's campus in the University City neighborhood of Philadelphia, at the intersection of 33rd and South Streets. It also is close enough for Drexel University students to walk or take SEPTA transportation services. Housing over 1.3 million artifacts, the museum features one of the most comprehensive collections of Middle and Near-Eastern art in the world.
Saba Mahmood (1961–2018) was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was also affiliated with the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Institute for South Asia Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. Her scholarly work straddled debates in anthropology and political theory, with a focus on Muslim majority societies of the Middle East and South Asia. Mahmood made major theoretical contributions to rethinking the relationship between ethics and politics, religion and secularism, freedom and submission, and reason and embodiment. Influenced by the work of Talal Asad, she wrote on issues of gender, religious politics, secularism, and Muslim and non-Muslim relations in the Middle East.
Alison Wylie is a Canadian philosopher of archaeology. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and holds a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of the Social and Historical Sciences.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is an anthropologist, educator, and author. She is the Chancellor's Professor Emerita of Anthropology and the director and co-founder of the PhD program in Critical Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her writing on the anthropology of the body, hunger, illness, medicine, motherhood, psychiatry, psychosis, social suffering, violence and genocide, death squads, and human trafficking.
Robert J. Sharer was an American archaeologist, academic and Mayanist researcher. He was known for his archaeological investigations at a number of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sites conducted over a career spanning four decades, and for his archaeological reports, theorizing, and writings in his field of specialty, the ancient Maya civilization. Sharer was a lecturer and professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Anthropology for more than 30 years, and as of 2008, occupied the endowed chair of Sally and Alvin V. Shoemaker Professor in Anthropology, an appointment which he held beginning in 1995. He also had an extensive association with Penn's University Museum of archaeology and anthropology, where from 1987 to 2009 he was the curator-in-charge of the museum's American collection and research section. He died on September 20, 2012.
Dr. Regina Bendix is a professor of European ethnology at the University of Göttingen, Germany.
Fekri Hassan is a geoarchaeologist. After studying geology and anthropology, Hassan commenced teaching at Washington State University department of Anthropology in 1974. From 1988 to 1990 he acted as advisor to the Ministry of Culture of Egypt. Currently professor emeritus, he had formerly held the chair of Petrie Professor of Archaeology (1994-2008) of the Institute of Archaeology and department of Egyptology of University College London. Program Director Master's of Cultural Heritage Management, French University of Egypt in partnership with the Paris-Sorbonne University. Editor of the African Archaeological Review journal, contributory editor of The Review of Archaeology he is also honorary president of the Egyptian Cultural Heritage Organisation.
Carolyn Sargent is an American medical anthropologist who is Professor Emerita of Sociocultural Anthropology and of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Sargent was the director of women's studies at Southern Methodist University from 2000-2008. Sargent served as president of the Society for Medical Anthropology for 2008-2010 and 2011-2012.
Joyce C. White is an American archaeologist, an adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, and executive director of the new Institute for Southeast Asian Archaeology. Her research primarily concerns decades-long multidisciplinary archaeological investigations in Thailand and Laos covering the prehistoric human occupation of the middle reaches of the Mekong River Basin. She is considered the world's leading expert on the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Ban Chiang, Thailand, and directs an archaeological fieldwork program in the Luang Prabang Province of Laos. She has become a strong advocate of cultural heritage preservation and has served as an expert witness in an antiquities trafficking case for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Rosemary A. Joyce is an American anthropologist and social archaeologist who has specialized in research in Honduras. She was able to archeologically confirm that chocolate was a byproduct of fermenting beer. She is also an expert in evaluating the archaeological records of society and the implications that sexuality and gender play in culture.
Wendy Rosalind James, was a British social anthropologist and academic. She was Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford from 1996 to 2007, and President of the Royal Anthropological Institute from 2001 to 2004.
Joan Margaret Gero was an American archaeologist and pioneer of feminist archaeology. Her research focused on gender and power issues in prehistory, particularly in the Andean regions of Argentina and Peru.
Stephanie Moser is an Australian archaeologist and academic. She is a professor and head of the department at the University of Southampton, England. Her work explores the exhibition and reception of the human past. Moser's research examines visual images from antiquity through the lens of modern anthropology.
Fumiko Ikawa-Smith is a Japanese Canadian archaeologist. She is an emeritus professor in the department of anthropology at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. She trained as an anthropologist and prehistorian and specialises in the Early Palaeolithic cultures in East Asia, specifically Japan). She is married to Philip E. L. Smith, also an archaeologist, with one son.
Deborah A. Thomas is an American anthropologist and filmmaker. She is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published books and articles on the history, culture, and politics of Jamaica; and on human rights, sexuality, and globalization in the Caribbean arena. She has co-produced and co-directed two experimental films, and has co-curated a multimedia exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. In 2016, she began a four-year term as editor-in-chief of the journal American Anthropologist. Before pursuing her career as an anthropologist, Thomas performed as a professional dancer with Urban Bush Women, a New York dance company that used art to promote social equity by illuminating the experiences of disenfranchised people.
Akinwumi Ogundiran is the Cardiss Collins Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Northwestern University. He is an archaeologist, anthropologist, and cultural historian, whose research focuses on the Yoruba world of western Africa, Atlantic Africa, and the African Diaspora. He was born in Ibadan, Nigeria, and migrated to the United States in 1993. He was Chancellor's Professor and Professor of Africana Studies, Anthropology & History at UNC Charlotte.
Raminder Kaur is a Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies in the Departments of Anthropology and International Development at the University of Sussex. She has conducted fieldwork in India and Britain researching topics such as migration, race/ethnicity/gender, the creative arts, heritage, public culture, aesthetics, censorship, human rights, religion and politics, public representations of, and the socio-political, health and environmental implications of nuclear developments, and 'cultures of sustainability'.
Uzma Z. Rizvi is an American archaeologist and associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute and a visiting scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan, where she teaches decolonial archaeology, ancient urbanism, critical heritage studies, new materialism, and the postcolonial critique. Her primary research centers on Ancient Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates during the third millennium BCE.
Anne Haour is an anthropologically trained archaeologist, academic and Africanist scholar. She is Professor in the Arts and Archaeology of Africa at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. She is a Fellow of the British Academy in Anthropology, Archaeology and Geography in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the social sciences, humanities and arts.
