News
This past week Bloomberg published a Q&A with Nick Kawa, Associate Professor of Anthropology, about his new book After the Flush: Rethinking the Future of Human Waste. The discussion delves into…
Shop the Anthropology Apparel 2026 Store!
Hurry, shops closes 10/5/2026.
Congratulations to Anthropology PhD student Luxin Yin on the publication of her latest research in BMJ Medical Humanities! Her new paper, titled "Looking back to look ahead: a BERTopic-assisted…
College students and workers alike are finding a new set of skills is needed for a rapidly changing workplace.
A computer-science degree is no longer a golden ticket. Stanford and MIT…
Recently highlighted in the Fall 2026 issue of the Ohio State Alumni Magazine, education at Ohio State Marion extends far beyond traditional classroom walls. The entire campus…
Samantha Kirgesner, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at The Ohio State University, has received a highly competitive Big Ten Academic Alliance Smithsonian Fellowship(opens in new window),…
New research from The Ohio State University Department of Anthropology sheds new light on one of the biggest questions in human evolution: How did our earliest ancestors move through the…
Elizabeth A. Holdsworth, PhD is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. She applied for a Spark Award to support her project “Daily Milk Composition and Infant Growth.”
…
A new find has emerged from the local soil: the remains of a young individual, who researchers suspect may have held a religious or clerical role, marking an incredibly rare and significant first…
What do American ranchers, Mongolian herders, and Navajo shepherds all have in common? They are all pastoralists.
The United Nations has declared 2026 the International Year of Rangelands…
Nick Passalacqua, associate professor of anthropology, discusses how anthropologists recover and analyze skeletal remains to build biological profiles including age, sex, stature, and ancestry. He…
The study reflects more than a decade of work by Associate Professor of Anthropology Sean Downey, with support from an NSF CAREER award, and finds that social norms in small-scale societies can…
Associate Professor Sean Downey (Department of Anthropology) has been selected as a Writing Resident at the [Paris Institute for Advanced Study (Paris IAS)] one of Europe's most prestigious…
A study co-authored with Scott Maddux (University of North Texas Health Science Center), Robert Franciscus (University of Iowa), Anastasiya Kharlamova and Lyudmila Trut (Institute of Cytology and…
A team of scientists that includes four OSU anthropologists - Mackie O’Hara, Emma Lagan, Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg, and Scott McGraw - published a paper in the prestigious journal
Julian Amedmariam was just awarded the College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research Scholarship! The scholarship, which is $4500, will support Julian's continued work analyzing interview…
Newly admitted graduate student Mehrab Hasan won the Patricia Whitten Prize at this year's meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropology for his…
Congratulations to Kaita Gurian on receiving the prestigious Albert A. Dahlberg Paper Competition award at the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) conference…
Huge congratulations to Lauren Hayden on being selected as a finalist for the Fulbright U.S. Student Program Research Award to Poland for academic year 2026-2027. The Fulbright Program is an…
A new essential resource in forensic anthropology is on the way! Ethics and Professionalism in Forensic Anthropology (Second Edition) is set to release April 14, offering an updated and…
The Ohio State University Department of Anthropology is seeing remarkable growth in its forensic anthropology program, reflecting rising student interest in hands-on, applied science. What began…
Lauren Hayden, a 3rd year PhD student, was awarded the Mildred Trotter Prize by the American Association of Biological Anthropologists (AABA) for her outstanding poster presentation, "Association…
Clark Larsen was awarded the Charles Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award at the recent meeting of the American Association of Biological Anthropology. The Charles R. Darwin Lifetime Achievement…
Congratulations to Grace Calhoun, a 2019 Anthropological Sciences (B.S.) major at OSU, who is now completing her PhD at the University of Florida. Her presentation, “Using 3D Printing to Investigate…
Anthropology GTA Kelsey Shearer was one of 21 GTAs to receive a 2025-2026 Graduate Associate Teaching Award from the Graduate School! The Graduate Associate Teaching Award is Ohio State’s highest…
Dr. Jeff Cohen's book Eating Grasshoppers was recently featured in Ohio State's Alumni Magazine. In his book, Dr. Cohen tells the history of chalupines which are a…
Dr. Mark Moritz was recently featured in OSU News for his work challenging common misconceptions about deserts and other rangelands. Often viewed as barren or unproductive, these landscapes,…
Anthropology graduate student, Nina Wilson, has been awarded the 2026 Beatrice Medicine Travel Award Scholarship. This prestigious scholarship honors the life and legacy of Dr…
The Department of Anthropology in Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences has officially opened the doors of the new Forensic Anthropology Laboratory — a milestone that furthers the hands-on…
We are thrilled to announce that Nora Warnick has received a substantial Undergraduate Research Scholarship!
Nora’s project is a craniodental comparison of the size of two different…
The goal of this short course is to familiarize students and professionals with the identification of fragmentary human skeletal remains. Emphasis will be placed on identifying and siding both…
Jude Snowden recently presented at the Office of Outreach and Engagement's annual Graduate Student Poster Competition which is part of their Community Partnership Breakfast. Jude's poster, which…
In their new, open-access study in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology by Jacob Scheinblum, Dr. Scott McGraw, Kaita Gurian, and Dr. Debbie Guatelli-Steinberg offer fresh insight into…
Professor Emeritus Paul Sciulli, was part of a large team that recently published a massive paper in Science on the origins of dogs in the Americas! In their article “The emergence and…
We are pleased to announce that two of our graduate students, Nagarathna Balakrishna and Allyson Simon have both received OSU’s Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship!
The…
Dr. Cohen was recently featured in OSU News for his work and new book on cahpulines in Oaxaca, Mexico!
Read the full article here!
Congratulations on your outstanding work…
Dr. Sean Downey was recently invited to present his research on adaptive self-organization in swidden agriculture at the 2025 Euro-CASE annual conference in Austria.
“Indigenous societies…
October 2, 2025
The Department of Anthropology in Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences has officially opened the doors of the new Forensic…
Dr. Jeffrey Cohen recently published in The Conversation, promoting his work in Oaxaca, Mexico on chapulines (seasonal toasted grasshoppers). In Oaxaca chapulines are…
The Department of Anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professor position. This position builds on the…
Eating Grasshoppers, Dr Jeffrey H. Cohen’s new ethnography from University of Texas Press, explores the cultural, economic, and culinary significance of chapulines (toasted grasshoppers) in Oaxaca…
Dr. Anna Willow’s new article, Anthropology’s Postapocalyptic Turn: New Temporalities for New Times, explores a shift in anthropological thought that embraces the postapocalyptic as a lived…
In their new article, Wright and Piperata explore the challenges of using Brazil’s standardized food insecurity scale (EBIA) in Parque das Tribos, a multiethnic, peri-urban Indigenous community in…
In their new article Rhue et al. characterize household water insecurity in the city of Belém, Pará, Brazil; an urban metropolitan located at the mouth of the Amazon River where water is abundant,…
Fieldwork at the St. Nicholas excavation, at Szent Miklós Hill in Székelyudvarhely, led by the Haáz Rezső Museum in collaboration with American students from the University of South Florida and…
Professor Emeritus Paul Sciulli, was part of a large team that recently published a massive paper in Science on the origins of dogs in the Americas! In their article “America’s lost dogs" the…
Faculty member Anna Willow and her colleagues Jake Boswell and Megan Jordan recently received an OSU Sustainability Research Seed Grant! Entitled “Empowering Youth Visions for Sustainable and…
Alumni Lisa Beiswenger, now a faculty member at Saint Francis University, was recently featured in a New York Times article looking at the amount of goods and items abandoned by college students…
McCorriston et al. (2025) presents a comprehensive archaeological and environmental study of 371 prehistoric stone monuments in Dhofar, Oman, revealing how monument construction by ancient…
According to the World Bank, 3.5 billion people across the planet lack access to ‘safely managed sanitation services.’ This isn’t just a problem in the Global South. In many parts of the US,…
On June 5th, the Department of Anthropology will host 100 Columbus City School teachers as part of the STEAMM Rising program at OSU. It will be a full day of activities where teachers discuss the…
In their new article, published in Royal Society Open Science, Tverskoi, Scaggs, and Downey present a complex adaptive systems (CAS) model to explore how labour reciprocity and normative reasoning…
In this episode of A Story of Us, Nagarathna Balakrishna chats with renowned paleoartist John Gurche as he candidly reflects on his early journey into reconstructing our ancestors, shares how he…
As we head into the summer, we are thrilled to take a moment and recognize all those who graduated from our department this Spring!
Congratulations Dr. Shane Scaggs! We are thrilled to see…
In their new article, published in the American Journal of Human Biology, Piperata et al. investigates the biocultural determinants of complementary feeding (CF) practices among 30 mothers in…
Dr. Douglas Crews and his colleagues Kathryn E. Marklein (University of Louisville), Mario Novak (Institute for Anthropological Research - Croatia) and Lucie Biehler-Gomez (University of Milan -…
Are you 18-29 years old, enrolled in college, as an undergraduate, at one of the following schools: Kenyon College, Oberlin College, Ohio State University, or Columbus State Community, and…
We are thrilled to highlight a new article published by faculty, graduate, and undergrdaduate students in Social Science & Medicine!
In their new article Moore et al. spotlight how TikTok is…
Former OSU Department of Anthropology members Isabel and Corey Maggiano, now faculty in the Department of Anthropology at the University of West Georgia, were recently featured in the 7th volume…
Once again, we are thrilled to highlight a new article written by PhD candidate Andrew Mitchel for FoodAntrhopology's blog!
In "Traditional Foods Forum: A Day of Indigenous Knowledge at the…
In this episode, we sit down with Julia Frost (frost6603@gmail.com), an undergraduate in the Anthropology Department at The Ohio State University, to talk all things archaeology, art, and ancient…
"From better career prospects to better relationships, learning about anthropology can do a lot for you"
Have you ever considered taking a course in anthropology…
We are thrilled to highlight a new article published by PhD candidate Andrew Mitchel in Anthropology News!
In "Negotiating Space and Taste in Los Angeles’ Oaxacan Community…
As of January 2025, Dr. Sean S. Downey has been appointed Co-Editor-in-Chief of Human Ecology, a leading journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of human-environment interactions…
Discussion led by David Hibler (EEOB) and Shane Scaggs (Anthropology, PhD candidates at The Ohio State University) Monday 7 April at 1-2 pm in 4094 Smith Laboratory
Presentation by Dr. Mike Rayo, Associate Professor of Integrated Systems Engineering, The Ohio State University
In this episode, Dr. Habiba Chirchir, a biological anthropologist, discusses her research on skeletal anatomy and behavior and its implications for understanding human evolution. She explores what…
On March 5th, Dr. Habiba Chirchir delivered a public lecture as part of the American Museum of Natural History’s Sci Café series, sponsored by the Leakey Foundation!
Dr. Chirchir discussed…
The wicked science team has launched a weekly Wicked Hour for all who are interested in wicked problems / science / students! It is an opportunity to discuss work in progress, brainstorm…
The Wicked Science team has launched a weekly Wicked Hour for all who are interested in wicked problems / science / students.
It is an opportunity to discuss work in progress, brainstorm…
We are pleased to highlight a new article published by members of our department in PLOS One!
"Inter-rater reliability of stress signatures in exfoliated primary dentition -…