December Anthropology News Roundup

aerial view of Angkor Wat
Anthropology Associate Professor Alison Carter appears on the PBS Nova documentary Angkor: Hidden Jungle Empire. Photo from PBS Nova. 

The December roundup for the Department of Anthropology features new publications from faculty, grant award announcements, media appearances — and more.

Jensen Wainwright

Received a Leakey Foundation dissertation grant to fund  field work in Uganda summer 2026 and my lab work to finish dissertation. The title of the proposal was "Small mammals as isotopic proxies of early hominin environments and diet in the Turkana Basin, Kenya.”

Dee Jolly

Dee Jolly and Zachary DuBois co-led a new open access paper for the special issue on queering biological anthropology at the American Journal of Biological Anthropology. Their paper outlines what queer and feminist perspectives can contribute to biocultural anthropology and provides an example of the kinds of insights such approaches can enable by exploring the relationships between physical symptoms and experiences of enacted stigma, resilience, and social supports among 158 trans and nonbinary people in the US.

Jolly, D.*, Puckett, J. A., Sturtz Sreetharan, C., Armstrong, S. E., Hope, D. A., Mocarski, R., Juster, R.-P., & DuBois, L. Z.*(2025) Queering studies of health and bodily experience: An example from the Transgender Resilience and Health Study. American Journal of Biological Anthropology . 188(4): e70183. http://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.70183 [*co-lead authors]

Zachary DuBois

A few publications coming out of the work of the Stress, Adaptation, and Resilience (STAR) Lab at the tail end of 2025 including one co-led with UO graduate student, Dee Jolly. All were invited papers to special issues engaging with gender/sex complexities and queering biocultural anthropology. The third is from a collaboration with colleagues at the Center of Studies on Sex*Gender, Allostasis, and Resilience at University of Montreal.

Alison Carter

The new volume of BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers(for Carter is editor) has been published. The journal is now hosted by UOregon Journals. Carter briefly appear in a new Nova documentary: Angkor: Hidden Jungle Empire that will premiere on PBS/OPB at 9pm on Jan. 28.

Nelson Ting

James Munyawera published a paper in Primates on mountain gorilla response to infant deaths.

Munyawera, J., Morrison, R., & Eckardt, W. (2025). Responses of mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) to deceased infants. Primates, 1-12.

Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-025-01229-w 

Leah Lowthorp

Leah Lowthorp was awarded a Fall 2026 Oregon Humanities Center faculty fellowship for the project “Hashtag Storytelling and CRISPR Gene Editing: Biotechnological Humor, Anxiety, and Hope Online.” She was also interviewed recently for the New Books Network podcast. You can find the interview on both the Anthropology and Folklore channels here. 

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