Faculty
Meet the Anthropology and Sociology Faculty
Faculty in anthropology and sociology and their interests are shown below. Contact individual faculty members via their linked profile pages.
Nancy Eberhardt, Chair
Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1984
"I have always been fascinated with the relation between culture and mind, with how the particular cultural notions that we happen to have grown up with affect our cognitive processes more generally."
Lawrence BreitbordeProfessor of Anthropology and Dean of the College
Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1978
"For more than thirty years, I have been studying change in the lives of urban west Africans. Sub-Saharan Africa remains one of the most intense locales for changes in the lifeways and values of people, with some of the highest rates of urbanization in the world, and extensive and complex multilingualism."
Jon WagnerProfessor of Anthropology
Ph.D., Indiana University, 1975
"My present research interests converge on how we as a culture envision the development of social cooperation, from its beginnings in human evlution to the utopian experiments of the present and our pop-culture fantasies of the future."
Gabrielle Raley
Assistant Professor of Anthropology-Sociology
Ph.D., University of California-Los Angeles, 2006
Amy SingerAssistant Professor of Anthropology-Sociology
Ph.D., University of Washington, 2005
"My new research study, of Balinese sea salt, extends questions of cultural production and commodification, while connecting to questions of globalization, commerce, and consumption."
David AmorInstructor of
Journalism and Anthropology
M.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1986
"I am interested in the complex interplay among journalists and other media producers, the organizations they work for, larger social and political institutions, and the imaginative and material lives of the ordinary people who work, play, think and dream in a world saturated by the mass media."
Elayne OliphantLecturer of Anthropology-Sociology
Ph.D. candidate, University of Chicago
"I am interested in the how, as social groups, we shape, represent, reproduce, and transform our worldviews, and how these processes are limited by the economic, social, political, and semiotic ideologies we have inherited."Cooperating Faculty from Other Programs
Diana BeckProfessor of
Educational Studies Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1997
"Working with two Navajo teachers on a fry bread research project and presenting it with them at the Navajo Studies National Conference was a very proud moment for them and their school-and for me."
Sarah Day-O'ConnellAssociate Professor of
MusicPh.D., Cornell University, 2004
"I am writing a book on the English Canzonetta, a genre of song popular in the late 18th century. 
Fredrick L. HordProfessor of Black Studies
Ph.D., Union Graduate School, 1987
"My most immediate projects are in the areas of Black Studies theory, African American literary criticism, Black psychology traditions, and the status of Blacks in Latin America."
Duane OldfieldAssociate Professor of
Political Science Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley, 1992
"I am currently working on a book to be titled Confronting the New World Order: Labor, the Christian Right, and the Politics of Globalization.Lecturers
Wendel Hunigan
Lecturer in Anthropology and Sociology
M.S., Illinois State University, 1971
Carol St. AmantLecturer in Anthropology and Sociology
M.A., University of Chicago, 1997
"As a professional social worker, while I worked in several different fields of practice, the bulk of my professional career was in the area of public child welfare delivery.In this field I started as a front line direct service worker with caseloads of intact families as well as families with children in foster care; I also investigated reports of suspected child abuse and neglect. "Emeritus Faculty
Jack Dean Fitzgerald
Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Walter Murray North
Professor Emeritus of Sociology
Jason Helfer 
It's important to me to get to know students and see their development I am Mark
Shroyer, associate professor of physics, and...
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