Grant & Career Achievements
The Department of Anthropology prepares our graduates with all of the knowledge and hands-on skills needed to excel in their field of choice.
About one-third of our graduates report continuing on to become professors, associate professors, or other kinds of academic faculty. Our graduates also enter into fields outside of academia, including business, law, medicine, research, engineering, and consulting.
Lisa Anderson-Levy (Ph.D. 2008) joined Macalester in 2021 as Executive Vice President and Provost. She spent the past 13 years as Professor of Anthropology at Beloit College. Her scholarly interests focus on race, class, and gender in the Caribbean and United States. Her ongoing research examines the operations of whiteness as identity, structural apparatus, and ideology.
Samantha Porter (Ph.D. 2019) currently runs the Advanced Imaging Service for Objects and Spaces at the University of Minnesota, where she connects students and researchers with technology. From 3D scanning and printing to virtual and augmented reality development, Samantha uses skills gained during her Anthropology training to conduct archaeological and broader research, enhance artists' creative work, and increase public engagement with science.
Meryl Lauer (Ph.D. 2018) is an assistant professor at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, the oldest conservatory in the United States. Her current book project is an ethnography of South African ballet and examines everyday choreographies of social inequality.
Amélie Allard (Ph.D. 2016) is now a faculty member of the Anthropology Department at Rhode Island College (Providence, RI), where she teaches anthropology and archaeology. Since graduating, she has conducted historical-archaeological research in the Great Lakes region of Canada and the US as a postdoctoral fellow at the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto, Ontario). As a college professor, she now uses her skills and creativity to share and transmit her passion of archaeology to undergraduate students as well as expand on her research on the relationship between community and waterways.
Leonore Phillips (Ph.D. 2016) is developing the design and user experience research discipline at a Twin Cities software company. Since graduating, she has worked as a design researcher on a variety of tech products from smart devices to business software. Her dissertation looked at the ways that ideologies of work shape the ways that software is built.
Heather O'Leary (Ph.D. 2014) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. She serves as the Director of EcoFem Lab, on the Executive Committee for the International Union for Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, and also on the Steering Committee for the World Anthropological Union. Dr. Heather O'Leary champions citizen engagement for sustainable urban development. Her research interests include transnational disparities related to women’s rights, water politics, urbanization and the environment. She regularly presents on these topics at national and international anthropology conferences and works with governance institutions like the OECD to find social-science solutions. Her dissertation explored the cultural dimensions in disparities in urban water access through engaged ethnography among Delhi's water-poor.
Claire A. Kirchhoff (B.A. 2003, M.A. 2008, Ph.D. 2010) is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Marquette University in her hometown of Milwaukee, WI. She is passionate about teaching human gross anatomy to health professional students, including physical therapy, dental, and undergraduate students. Her research addresses what it means to be human, integrating primate skeletal analysis with morphological and behavioral data in order to create narratives about foodways, social systems, life history, health, and mortality.
Alumna Kathleen Kuehnast is a socio-cultural anthropologist and director of the Gender Policy and Strategy at the United States Institute of Peace.