Anthropology Faculty

Chair
Jackson Roper
Associate Professor
Monty Roper is a cultural anthropologist interested in the political economy of natural resource management, indigenous social movements, Non-governmental organizations, and community development. His research has focused on small-scale rural indigenous and agricultural communities in Latin America...
Jonathan Andelson
Professor Senior Faculty

Rosenfeld Professor in Social Science

Jonathan Andelson was born in Chicago and earned a B.A. from Grinnell in 1970 and a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 1974. His main interests are intentional communities, religion, agriculture, and human-environment interactions. His principal field research, on the Amana...
Vicki Bentley-Condit
Professor Senior Faculty
Vicki Bentley-Condit has taught biological anthropology at Grinnell since 1995. She is a primatologist who has conducted research with both wild and captive baboon populations and captive rhesus macaques. Her primary research interests are mother-infant relationships and infant development. However...
Brigittine French
Professor

Assistant Vice President of Global Education

Brigittine French joined the Grinnell faculty in 2003 and is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program. French is a linguistic and political anthropologist whose diverse body of teaching and research focuses on theoretical and ethnographic approaches to narrative...
Katya Gibel Mevorach
Professor Senior Faculty
Katya Gibel Mevorach holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. She received her B.A. and M.A. in African Studies from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Gibel Mevorach is a Professor in Anthropology and American Studies at Grinnell College. Baccalaureate 2017: Professor...
Professor

Heath Visiting Professor in Anthropology

Cynthia Hansen
Associate Professor

Associate Dean of the College

On leave 2023–24 academic year. Cynthia Hansen began teaching in the Linguistics Concentration at Grinnell in January 2012. Her research focuses on the documentation and linguistic description of Iquito, a highly endangered language of the Peruvian Amazon. She teaches the core courses within the...
Kathryn Kamp
Professor Senior Faculty

Earl D. Strong Professor in Social Studies

Kathryn Kamp teaches anthropology and archaeology at Grinnell College. While she has worked in Syria and Belize, her major research focus is the study of the Puebloan populations who once resided near modern Flagstaff, Arizona where she has been excavating and doing survey for over twenty years. She...
Assistant Professor
Owen Kohl’s research explores connections between media-making and different social imaginations of home. Among other questions, he asks how belonging and communication technologies intersect with violently constructed national homelands—both in the contemporary US and after socialist Yugoslavia’s...
Tess Kulstad
Assistant Professor
Tess M. Kulstad Gonzalez is a sociocultural anthropologist with a longstanding interest in the social construction of relatedness, childrearing, and the human rights of children. Her research explores the ways in which local and global sociocultural, economic, political processes affect family...
Joshua Marshack
Assistant Professor
On leave 2023–24 academic year. Joshua Marshack is a biological anthropologist who uses our closest living relatives, the great apes, as a jumping-off point to study the evolution of social behavior, elucidate the origins of status changes in humans, and challenge biological determinism and...
Asian woman with dark medium-long hair and glasses against greenery.
Assistant Professor
Laura W. Ng is a historical archaeologist with a research focus on the archaeology of transpacific migration and Asian diasporic communities. She conducts archaeological research on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese migration and the transpacific circulation of people, goods, and...
Maria Tapias
Professor
On Leave fall 2022 through spring 2023. Maria Tapias earned her PhD in Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and has been teaching at Grinnell since 2001. Her research interests include women's and infants' health, the anthropology of emotions, the impacts of neoliberalism on...
John Whittaker
Professor Senior Faculty
John Whittaker (BA Cornell U. 1975, PHD U. of Arizona 1984) has been teaching at Grinnell since 1984. He considers himself an anthropological archaeologist, which means that while he prefers working with ancient people, he considers himself free to snoop into any aspect of human life, and all people...

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