Exciting news from our graduate students featured by the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality! ✨ 🏆 Hongyun Yu received the Seth Balkishan Das Singhal Award for his paper "Uterotopic Fantasies and Far-Right Gender Imaginaries among Chinese Working-Class Male Migrants in Africa."

Alejandra Osejo-Varona has been named as one of the outstanding PhD candidates for this year’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellows for her project, "Hippos in the Afterlives of the Drug Trafficking in Colombia: Enduring Marks on the Magdalena River."

Professor and Associate Chair Cymene Howe has been appointed Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, effective Spring 2026. She said, “I’m excited to begin engaging with each of the contributing authors and my excellent team of Area Editors at Oxford Bibliographies!”

Congratulations to all our graduates! 🎓✨ Special congrats to doctoral graduates Kristin Gupta and Melanie Ford, and to Veronica Solis Mora on completing her Master's degree. We are proud of all our undergraduate & graduate students and excited to see what's next.

🎉 Congratulations to our amazing staff, Shawna Forney, for receiving the Staff Service Award! Come and celebrate at the @ricesocsci.bsky.social End of Year Faculty & Staff Reception on May 6, 3:30pm - 5:00pm, Kraft Hall 130. Light bites and beverages will be provided.

The Department of Anthropology is proud to announce that Ihsan Arsalan has been awarded a 2026Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. (@acls1919.bsky.social)

New publication! Our assistant professor, Huatse Gyal, has published an article, "Politics of deflection, climate change, and contested narratives of land degradation in eastern Tibet," in EPE: Nature and Space. Read the article here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

JOIN US and the Department of Religion & Program in STS for a Brown Bag Talk “From Talking Tools to Metahumans: Social Interaction, Semiotic Skill, and the Authority of AI Chatbots” with Webb Keane, George Herbert Mead Distinguished University Professor [...]

JOIN US for a Brown Bag Talk “An Archaeology of Civil Rights in the 20th Century: The Visionary Pragmatism of Race Women” with Anna Agbe-Davies, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, on Friday, April 17, at 12:00pm in Sewall 570 & Zoom.

JOIN US and the Program in Science and Technology Studies for a Brown Bag Talk “Disability Worlds in the Shadow of Ableism” with Faye Ginsburg, Kriser Professor of Anthropology at New York University, on Friday, April 10, at 12:00pm in Sewall 570 and Zoom.

Our Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Ilana Gershon, co-authored with Amy J. Cohen "Living Under Contract: An LPE Analysis of American Democracy," published in The University of Chicago Law Review (Vol. 93, Issue 2). Read the article here: lawreview.uchicago.edu/print-archiv...

In our graduate course, "Anthropological Directions: from the Second World War to the Present," taught by Professor Cymene Howe, we had an outdoor class to discuss Tim Ingold's book chapter "To journey along a way of life: Maps, wayfinding and navigation."

We had a fun and inspiring Ethnographic Design Co.Lab workshop with our professors, Cymene Howe and Vivian Lu, where we got hands-on crafting collages. Thanks to everyone who joined us for the EDC workshop.

Our professors Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer joined the panel "Storytelling in a Time of Transition" at this year's South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin.

JOIN US for the last two Ethnographic Co.Lab workshops of the semester. The first event is a collage workshop co-led by our own Professor Vivian Lu and Cymene Howe. Register via QR code.

Our undergraduate student Max Scholl is featured in Rice News for building a space for critical thinking beyond the classroom. As co-founder of the Rice Critical Humanities Collective (RCHC), he brings students together across disciplines to engage questions of culture, politics, and knowledge.

Yesterday, we hosted our annual Mutant Anthropologies workshop with Professor Deepa Das Acevedo, Editor-in-Chief of PoLAR (Political and Legal Anthropology Review).

Published! Our graduate student, Quinn Georgic, published "Disrupting the Whitened Lemur: Reading Black Trans* Considerations in Feminist Primatology" in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience (Vol. 12, No. 1). Read the full article: catalystjournal.org/index.php/ca...

JOIN US in celebrating Associate Professor Gökçe Günel's new book, Floating Power: Energy, Infrastructure, and South-South Relations (Duke University Press, 2026), on April 27 at 12 pm at the Welcome Center.

We had a wonderful Ethnographic Design CoLab workshop with filmmaker Kevin Everson, where we learned about the process and craft of filmmaking.

In our graduate course, "Anthropological Directions: from the Second World War to the Present," taught by Professor Cymene Howe, we hosted anthropologist Nomi Stone (Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Dallas)

Our Professor, Dr. Gökçe Günel, joins the Doha Debates Podcast (S2 E6), "Will tech utopias rescue or ruin humanity?" Listen to the full episode here: dohadebates.com/technology/w...

Will tech utopias rescue or ruin humanity?

Would you live in a futuristic, tech-run city? This debate explores whether tech-run cities like Praxis or Próspera truly offer a brighter future for all, or whether they are exclusive enclaves for th...

dohadebates.com

JOIN US for the first Ethnographic Design Co.Lab workshop of the semester with filmmaker Kevin Everson: "Filmmaking and the Practice of Daily Life," Feb 27, 12-2pm, Sewall Hall 570. Everson is the Commonwealth and Ruffin Foundation Distinguished Professor of Art at the University of Virginia.

Published! Our Assistant Professor, Dr. Victoria Massie, has published "Sensing Bimbia: Ancestry Reconnection in an Anti-Crisis Atmosphere" in Cultural Anthropology (Vol. 41, Issue 1). Read the full article here: journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca...

JOIN US and the Program in STS for a Brown Bag Talk “Becoming “Disease-Agnostic”: Translational Science, Biomedical Innovation, and the Valorization of Universal Utility in the Sciences”

JOIN US and the Program in STS for a Brown Bag Talk “Becoming “Disease-Agnostic”: Translational Science, Biomedical Innovation, and the Valorization of Universal Utility in the Sciences”

In our Anthropology Department's Eat Me: Food & Culture Globally course with Professor Cymene Howe, we had the privilege of hosting a live session for the Cultures of Energy podcast. Our students, after reading Nicole Negowetti’s Feeding the Future, engaged with her in a lively Q&A.

Join our Assistant Teaching Professor, Molly Morgan, and the Center for Teaching Excellence for Pedagogical Sciences in Practice (PSP) Showcase on Wednesday, February 18, 12:00 - 1:00 PM, Herring Hall 129.

Our Professor, Cymene Howe, co-authored a new publication, "Melting glaciers as symbols of tourism paradoxes," in Nature Climate Change.

Anthropologist Christien Tompkins is giving a talk at Rice tomorrow at 4 pm in Anderson Hall 117, as part of the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) Speaker Series. More information on the poster.