Notre Dame anthropology students have gone and done spectacular things! Be sure to check out their stories recounting their accomplishments and adventures in the stories below.
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With striking beauty and emotional frankness, On the Great Land weaves together thirteen vibrant short stories that explore community, loss, trauma, and healing in one of the most mesmerizing and demanding places in the world.
As an orthopedic resident at Loyola University Medical Center, Daniel Schmitt ’11 sees a wide variety of patients. Schmitt, who majored in anthropology and biology, relies on his liberal arts education to connect with his diverse patient base and treat them comprehensively at the Level I trauma center — a hospital providing the highest level of surgery to trauma victims.
Kevin Rahill ’12 likes challenges. He liked them when he was on the swim team at Notre Dame, and he must have especially liked them when he decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in 2013. But he didn’t attempt the feat for the physical challenge alone.
Libby Hasse ’08 always knew she wanted to join the Peace Corps. She just didn’t realize what an impact it would have on her career. The experience still resonates today in her work as an attorney at the Tahirih Justice Center — a national nonprofit that provides pro bono legal services to immigrant women.
A trio of Notre Dame students and alumni have been named Yenching Scholars, a globally competitive award that provides a full scholarship and stipend to pursue an interdisciplinary master’s degree at China’s top university. Teresa Kennedy ’16, an anthropology and peace studies major from Wilbraham, Massachusetts; senior Jenny Ng, a political science major from Sai Kung, Hong Kong; and Dominic Romeo ’14, a political science and Chinese major from Turlock, California, were named to the third cohort entering the Yenching Academy, based at Peking University in Beijing.
Notre Dame's sustainability program, open to all majors, seeks to inspire students to cultivate practices and ways of living that preserve natural resources for future generations. The minor is housed in the College of Science, but it has proven to be an ideal way for Arts and Letters students to connect their interest in science with their passion for the humanities.
Mariel Kennedy (ND'16), a former advisee of Prof. Rahul Oka now working as a research analyst with Goldman Sachs, won the Society for Economic Anthropology's 2016 Harold K. Schneider Student Prize in Economic Anthropology.
The young people of war-torn northern Colombia want their homes and their lifestyle back. Displaced from their villages by guerilla and paramilitary groups, they have spent the last 10 years in urban centers—making them prime targets for recruitment by those same criminal enterprises. But rather than falling prey to a violent cause, they’ve founded a successful peace-building movement. Notre Dame Ph.D. student Angela Lederach ’07 wants to know why. She’s spent the last two summers living in Cartagena, Colombia, researching the Peaceful Movement of the Alta Montaña, and plans to return in August for at least a year to continue researching the organization for her dissertation.
If you had asked me at the beginning of my freshman year at Notre Dame whether I planned to pursue a career in anthropology, I almost certainly would not have replied in the affirmative. In fact, my response would likely have been more along the lines of “What exactly is anthropology?” Like many new college students, I had never been properly introduced to the field, and had no real concept of what it was that anthropologists actually did. All I had to go by were a few largely random names that had cropped up in the news or my past schoolwork: Paul Farmer, Franz Boas, Jane Goodall, Indiana Jones (all right, maybe that last one is a little out of place).
