Department of Anthropology
Edit Subhead Text
Graduate Student Spotlight
"If you asked me 25 years ago what I wanted to be when I grew up, I’d tell you an archaeologist. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania...and nothing was more exciting to me than coming across old foundations in the woods while on a hike with my family. I chose to study coal mining for much the same reason. My great-grandfather, Julius, was a coal miner and having grown up in near-poverty I have always been interested in class, inequality, and labor. So, when I decided to pursue historical archaeology, I knew I wanted to study underrepresented people’s history in a household-context, and my own poor immigrant ancestors were the perfect focus."
The Department of Anthropology is excited to share an interview with Graduate Student Gwendolyn Jones, conducted by Julia Earle. This series will continue to highlight the amazing and impactful work of our students — in Austin and around the world — a few times each year.
About the Department
We offer a broad program of research, teaching, and community engagement that builds upon the historical strengths of archaeology, linguistic anthropology, biological anthropology and sociocultural anthropology in order to understand and address the challenges of a culturally diverse, increasingly globalized, and rapidly-changing world.
Our aim is to research and teach toward a better understanding of the world; a world in which the articulation of local cultural forms and identities with global processes is increasingly complicated and consequential; one in which the relationships among all types of social groups, from individuals to governments to multi-national corporations, are evolving and taking new forms; one in which race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of cultural identity are forever shifting in form and significance; one in which the relationship of human beings to both the natural and constructed environment is at an increasingly critical stage.
Graduate Student Spotlight: Sarah Eleazar
Eleazar is a doctoral student in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
Banner Photo: