University of Notre Dame Assistant Professor David Hernández recently received a trio of research awards: a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and a fellowship from Harvard’s Loeb Classical Library Foundation. “I am honored and thrilled to receive this tremendous help for my research,” says Hernández, who is a faculty member in both the Department of Classics and the Department of Anthropology.

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Catherine Reidy, a University of Notre Dame senior majoring in psychology with a minor in anthropology, has been awarded a Clarendon Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford.

Reidy, a Rhodes Scholar finalist, will use the scholarship to study for her master’s degree in African Studies starting in October.

Since her freshman year at Notre Dame, Reidy has focused her academic work on international research. In the spring of her first year, she was awarded a Kellogg Institute for International Studies internship in India. She was accepted into the Kellogg International Scholars Program, which allowed her to begin undergraduate research as a sophomore.

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Each year, approximately 30 percent of seniors in the College of Arts and Letters complete a yearlong thesis project, working one-on-one with a faculty member or graduate student to make an intellectual contribution to their chosen field of study.

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I remember reading the description for the anthropology major at Notre Dame kind of like you remember meeting a good friend for the first time.

It was the summer before my freshman year, and in retrospect, I cannot recall the moment without a musical cue in the background heralding the significance of the moment. I can claim little credit for the great experiences I have had since, for it has without doubt been the support and encouragement of faculty members of Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology that has made it possible.

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I Did It to Save My Life: Love and Survival in Sierra Leone

Catherine E. Bolten

Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Peace Studies

I Did it To Save My Life provides fresh insight into how ordinary Sierra Leoneans survived the war that devastated their country for a decade. Individuals in the town of Makeni narrate survival, illuminating a social world based on love that transcends romance and binds people together across space and through time. In situating their wartime lives firmly in this world, they call into question the government’s narrative that Makeni residents collaborated with rebel forces. Instead, they argue that it was the government’s disloyalty to its people, rather than rebel invasion and occupation, which destroyed the town and forced uneasy co-existence between civilians and militants.…

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Researching, exploring, and seeking to understand other cultures are essential to anthropology—and a key part of a Notre Dame liberal arts education. Junior Greg Yungtum had the opportunity to do all of these things during a trip to Africa this past summer.

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“I wanted to learn how to think and to challenge my beliefs and to learn about the world, and then learn how to engage that world when I got out of college—that’s what anthropology does,”" says Sarah McGough, a junior anthropology major in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters and a student in the Glynn Family Honors Program.

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The University of Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters will launch a doctoral program in the Department of Anthropology, with the first cohort of students due to enroll in fall 2014. The new program, says Susan Blum, professor and chair of the department, will focus its curriculum and training on integrative anthropology.

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Rahul Oka, Ford Family Assistant Professor of anthropology at Notre Dame, has conducted five seasons of ethnographic research in the 90,000-person Kakuma Refugee Camp, in the Turkana District in northwest Kenya, where refugees from war—from southern Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Congo and Uganda—co-exist.

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Here is the grant report I wrote for Nanovic for my summer experience doing research in Bulgaria:

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