We celebrate the successes of our faculty and students. Congratulations to all!
Faculty
Chloe Ahmann’s book, Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore, received an Honorable Mention for the Gregory Bateson Prize, which is awarded each year by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. Named after distinguished anthropologist, semiotician, cyberneticist, and photographer Gregory Bateson, the award reflects the SCA’s mandate to promote theoretically rich, ethnographically grounded research that engages the most current thinking across the arts and sciences.
Caitlín Barrett received the Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America. This was for a book, Households in Context: Dwelling in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, which had its origins in a 2018 conference at Cornell.
Sarah Besky was selected for the 2024–25 State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence for major contributions to building the academic community at Cornell and in the profession. She developed research and study abroad opportunities in South Asia and served as president of the Society for the Anthropology of Work from 2019 to 2023.
Amiel Bize was one of ten faculty members named by the Cornell Center for Social Sciences to its 2026-27 Faculty Fellows cohort. The fellows will use dedicated time and funding to pursue research across the social sciences.
Amiel’s project: Drylands Finance: Climate Change and Financial Experimentation in Pastoral Communities
Stacey Langwick was awarded a Wenner-Gren Engaged Research Grant for her project: "Chronic Disease, Climate Change, and What It Means to Eat Well in Postcolonial Tanzania.” Langwick seeks to understand what it means to “eat well” in a time of rising rates of chronic disease, climate change, expanding social inequality, and intensification of property regimes that support the enclosure of land and plant life. This research project extends her collaboration with TRMEGA (Training, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation on Gender and AIDS), a non-governmental organization in Tanzania, that teaches that eating well is a mode of dwelling in ways that nourish bodies and communities, that strengthen ecologies and economies, and that foster patterns of regeneration. Langwick will help TRMEGA develop, systematize, and test the impact of their approach. Together they are writing, implementing, and evaluating a curriculum that addresses health through the extension of gardens and a reattachment to plants and soils.
Sturt Manning received the P. E. MacAllister Field Archaeology Award from the American Society of Overseas Research. The award is given annually to honor an archaeologist who has made outstanding contributions to ancient Near Eastern and Eastern Mediterranean archaeology during their career.
The Tompkins County History Center exhibit “Sacred Ground: Excavating Black History at Ithaca’s Freedom Church” received a preservation award from Historic Ithaca last fall for its public contribution to scholarship in local archaeology and community history. Adam T. Smith curated the exhibition, along with Cindy Kjellander-Cantu (History Center) and Arnav Tandon (CIAMS-MA), highlighting discoveries from four-years of excavation at Ithaca’s St. James A.M.E. Zion Church. The research involved almost 100 Cornell students and over 30 kids from the Ithaca Community. The project also involved a large number of Cornell faculty supported the excavations, including Gerard Aching (Africana), Lori Khatchadourian, Nerissa Russell, Fred Gleach, Sherene Baugher, Sturt Manning (Classics), and Samantha Sanft (CIAMS).
Graduate Students
Karina Edouard was awarded a Wenner Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant for her project titled: "Labor in Love: Political Activism, Motherhood, and the Politics of Reciprocity in Boston’s Haitian Diaspora."
Nia Whitmal was awarded a Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship. Nia describes her research…My doctoral research is an upward ethnography of the wealth accumulation strategies of black, property-owning Harlemites, and their invocations of ‘luck’ to explain their advantageous position in the neighborhood. I will study intraracial class dynamics that ensue as private developers alter the landscape of the neighborhood. In addition to structured interviews and participant observation, I employ ethnographic filmmaking for a nuanced depiction of the black middle class, a largely underrepresented population in anthropological inquiry.
Anna Whittemore received the "Student Paper Award," which was awarded at the annual business meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, for her paper "Defining a 'Good Candidate' for Skull Surgery: A Comparison of Cranial Fractures with and without the Trepanation Treatment in the Ancient Andes (ca. 800–1200 CE)."
Anna also received the Poster Award at the World Mummy Congress in Cusco this year for her poster “Estilos y técnicas de la preparación de momias en la sierra central, d.C. 500–1500 [Preparation Styles and Techniques of Mummies in the Central Highlands, 500–1500 CE].”
Yui Sasajima was awarded a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant this past October. Yui’s project title is "Agroecology’s Protagonists: The Gendered Micropolitics of Development in Ecuador."
Undergraduate Students
Jona Cekici, a sophomore majoring in anthropology, was selected for the College of Arts & Sciences Pathways Internship Program.
Emma Dalla Costa, Remy Kageyama, Sayuri Pfeiffer, and Yvette Reyes were awarded the Freedman Award for Undergraduate Research in Anthropology in May 2025. Read more about Yvette's research and Emma's fieldwork.
Isabel Macedo, a senior majoring in anthropology, was one of eight students named undergraduate Migrations scholars. Undergraduate Migrations scholars help promote the study of migration on Cornell's campus.
