News

Dr. Lee Cronk has been promoted to the rank of Distinguished Professor. This is a significant and well-deserved recognition of Lee's outstanding contributions to the Anthropology Department and the broader academic community.

Lee's dedication, research excellence, and commitment to teaching have set a high standard for all. This promotion is a testament to the impact Lee has made through his work, and it reflects the respect and admiration he has earned from peers, students, and colleagues alike. Congratulations to Lee on this remarkable achievement!

         - Submitted by Omar Dewachi, Department Chair

Katheleen (Kate) Riley announced the publication of an anthology she co-edited, published in February 2024:

Riley, Kathleen C., Bernard C. Perley, Inmaculada M. Garcia-Sanchez, editors. Language and Social Justice: Global Perspectives.  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.

Description:  Language, whether spoken, written, or signed, is a powerful resource that is used to facilitate social justice or undermine it. The first reference resource to use an explicitly global lens to explore the interface between language and social justice, this volume expands our understanding of how language symbolizes, frames, and expresses political, economic, and psychic problems in society, thus contributing to visions for social justice.

Dr. Erin Vogel was granted the Presidential Outstanding Faculty Scholar Award for 2022-23.  The award honors tenured faculty members whose breadth of academic portfolios reflect outstanding research, scholarship, or creative work, as well as truly outstanding contributions to teaching along with extensive service to the Rutgers community and beyond.

 PRESIDENTIAL OUTSTANDING FACULTY SCHOLAR AWARD (left to right) Zhiping Pang, Neuroscience and Cell Biology, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Mehdi Javanmard, Electrical and Computer Engineering, School of Engineering, Erin Vogel, Anthropology, School of Arts and Sciences, President Holloway, Grace D. Brannigan, Physics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences–Camden, and Ashaki Rouff, Earth and Environmental Sciences, School of Arts and Sciences–Newark. Not pictured David S. Kurnick, English, School of Arts and Sciences.

Professor Robert Scott has served as the Anthropology Department's Undergraduate Program Director for almost seven years.  As the COVID crisis unfolded, he helped to develop contingency online teaching plans and individually coached and encouraged many faculty members.

Read more: Dr. Robert Scott Given SAS Special Award for Pandemic Pedagogy

See more here.

Erin Vogel, Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology, is co-director of the Tuanan Orangutan Research Station. The Tuanan team is currently fighting fires at the station and surrounding forest that are a result of El Niño and small scale fires that have spread throughout the region of Central Kalimantan. Read more about the fires in Indonesia here. Professor Vogel's work on orangutan diet and conservation was recently highlighted in Scientific American.

Lee Cronk's research with The Human Genorosity Project was recently featured in High Country News, a magazine for those living in the Rocky Mountain region. Dr. Cronk is mentioned as well as graduate student Dennis Sonkoi. Read the article, Why Being a Good Neighbor is a Good Idea.

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Listen to Professor Angelique Haugerud's interview on NPR's Leonard Lopate Show, Primary Emotions: How Frustration Generates Satire and Political Protest. Haugerud talks about her book, No Billionaire Left Behind: Satirical Activism in America and what her research reveals about protests and the current election cycle.

Professor Erin Vogel was awarded the 2017 Rutgers Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and was also named as a Henry Rutgers Term Chair Professor (2017-2022).

Professor Erin Vogel received a 3-year research grant from the National Science Foundation (2017-2020) titled “Coping with a challenging environment: a holistic approach to
nutritional immunology in wild Bornean orangutans”. The goal of this project is to understand how nutritional strategy modulates immune function in response to natural variation in nutrient availability in one of our closest living relatives, orangutans.

Professor Erin Vogel received a 2-year research grant from the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation (2017-2019) focusing on nutritional immunology in wild Bornean orangutans.

Professor Robert Scott has been awarded a 3-year Senior Research Grant from the National Science Foundation titled "Collaborative Research: Experimental Assessment of Dental Micro-wear Formation”. His research team will conduct experiments designed to evaluate how patterns of microscopic damage in teeth that result from foods of varying mechanical properties should be interpreted to reconstruct diet in fossil humans.