Faculty & Staff
Faculty Spotlight
Dr. Daniel Lende receives 2009 Ganey Award
Daniel Lende, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, has been named the winner of the 2009 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Faculty Community-Based Research Award. The award, which includes a $5,000 prize, honors a Notre Dame faculty member whose research has made a contribution to a local community organization.
Lende’s work focuses on medical anthropology, the synthesis of biological and cultural anthropology, and applied anthropology. His research centers on behavioral health problems, particularly substance use and abuse.
Inspired by the positive impact of community-based research on learning outcomes, student development and a community organization’s capacity to improve its services, Lende in 2006 developed a community-based research course, “Researching Disease: Methods in Medical Anthropology,” with a grant from Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns. In this course, Lende and teams of Notre Dame undergraduates partnered with local community organizations including Imani Unidad, African American Women in Touch, Notre Dame Office of Alcohol and Drug Education, and a support group for veterans suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
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Dr. Susan D. Blum new book is published, "My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture."
Dr. Susan Blum has been with the University of Notre Dame since 2000. Dr. Blum specializes in cultural, linguistic, and psychological anthropology. Throughout her career Dr. Blum has researched deception and truth, multilingualism, person and self, ethnicity, nationalism and identity, childhood and higher education, food, and anthropological theory. This semester she is thoroughly enjoying teaching the course entitled Food and Culture, but she feels that every course is her favorite.
Blum recently published the book entitled My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture. She is the author or editor of four other books, and has made professional contributions to a number of scholarly books and publications. The Department of Anthropology commends Dr. Blum for her hard work and dedication to her research and students.
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Dr. Jada Benn Torres is the newest member of our faculty.
Dr. Jada Benn Torres joined the faculty fall 2008. She was delighted to return to Notre Dame for its academic and spiritual environments. "These qualities have always appealed to me first an an undergraduate (class of 1999), and now as new faculty." Here, she knows that she will have the support of both outstanding colleagues and outstanding students. Returning to campus gives her the opportunity to pursue her research interests as well as continue Notre Dame's legacy of teaching and research excellence.
Dr. Benn Torres is a biological anthropologist with a specialization in molecular anthropology. In general terms, the type of research that she does explores anthropological issues such as human variation and relatedness using molecular genetic techniques. For example, in her research, she used DNA to identify West African source populations of modern African Caribbean peoples. In another project she examined the relationship between genes and language for three West African ethnic groups. Within this academic year, she will be opening the Laboratory of Molecular Anthropology in 108 Reyniers. She will continue her research in the African origins of Caribbean peoples as well as start a new project on genetic ancestry and uterine fibroids.
Her academic background is somewhat similar to our students'…she is a Notre Dame graduate, class of 1999, having earned a Bachelor’s Degee in anthropology/pre-med and computer applications. She then went on to complete graduate school at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, NM. After earning her doctorate, she spent two years at the University of Chicago in a molecular epidemiology laboratory. She is very excited and honored to be back at Notre Dame and part of one of the best departments on campus. "I look forward to getting to know and work with anthropology students - please feel free to drop by my office to meet me and to chat."
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Mark Schurr Recipient of the 2008 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Community-Based Research Award
Mark Schurr, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Notre Dame and Chairperson of the Anthropology Department, is the 2008 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D. Faculty Community-Based Research Award winner. The award, in the amount of $5000, honors a Notre Dame faculty member whose research has made a contribution to a local community organization.
Dr. Schurr began research in 2003 with the Kankakee Valley Historical Society (KVHS) to learn about the diverse ways Native Americans responded to the forced removal from their land during the 1800’s. In the course of the project, more than 40 Notre Dame students conducted field work with an experienced team of professionals and over 200 volunteers who unearthed remnants of a past. Such work supports the aims of the KVHS, whose mission is the restoration and interpretation of the Kankakee Valley environment as well as preservation of archeological resources on the property.
Schurr’s work is recognized by peers as the largest archaeology project of any kind that engages the public as full participants in all aspects of the work.
Schurr received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1989 and a BS in Chemistry from Purdue University in 1977. Prior to his graduate studies, he worked as a chemist.
This award is funded by local entrepreneur and philanthropist, Rod Ganey, and awarded by the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns. The Center facilitates community-based learning, research, and service for Notre Dame undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. Since 1983, over 14,000 students and hundreds of faculty have been engaged in its courses and programs.
For more information about the Ganey Award visit socialconcerns.nd.edu/faculty.
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Archaeologist Glowacki Hits All the Right Notes
Donna Glowacki may be an archaeologist today, but when she first started thinking about a career, a shovel wasn’t her instrument of choice.
Enrolling at Miami University as a music major, she intended to devote her undergraduate years to mastering the trumpet. The summer before she left for college, however, a city youth employment program placed her at the SunWatch Indian Village/ Archaeological Park. While her primary responsibilities were grounds-keeping, the job also gave Glowacki an opportunity to participate in the excavation of a 12th/13th-century Native American village.
“Turns out that I had an aptitude for seeing soil color differences and was detail-oriented,” she says, “and ended up spending most of that summer excavating and doing reconstruction at the stockaded village rather than mowing the lawn. I enjoyed that experience so much that within a year at Miami, I had changed majors and started my career as a professional archaeologist.”
Glowacki, who joined the Department fall 2007 as the John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Assistant Professor of Anthropology, specializes in the American Southwest and has conducted fieldwork at more than 60 of the largest sites in the Northern San Juan region. Recently, she was co-project director of the Mesa Verde Village Assessment Project run by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center.
Her current research focuses on examining the depopulation of the Northern San Juan region from A.D. 1150–1300, work that expands on her doctoral dissertation. In it, Glowacki showed that some sort of social disruption preceded the drought and increased violence commonly cited as the reasons why people left the area, which roughly corresponds to the “Four Corners” where the borders of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet.
“My interests at the moment are exploring models to account for how remarkable changes in settlement organization and public architecture, paired with some key continuities, could have affected societal organization, particularly with respect to religious practices,” she says. “My other interest is in tracking pottery exchange networks using neutron activation analysis to determine how connected people were throughout the region prior to the depopulation.”
And with all due respect to her trumpet, Glowacki couldn’t be happier with the decision she made back during that first year of college.
“I think everyone has an inherent interest in the past, where we came from and just the cool, adventurous side of doing archaeology, but I never really thought one could actually make a living at it,” she says.
“Fortunately, I was wrong.”
Read Donna Glowacki's faculty profile >