The Faculty of The Wichita State University Department of Anthropology
Dr. Donald Blakeslee (Archaeological Anthropologist)
During his sophomore year of college at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, Dr. Blakeslee had the opportunity to spend a summer in Montana and Wyoming working with a surveying and digging crew for a River Basin Project. Ever since, "I knew I didn't want to do anything else." Since his arrival at Wichita state 1976, Dr. Blakeslee has been hard at work recruiting students into the field of Archaeology, just as he was in his sophomore year. [More...]
Dr. Dorothy K. Billings (Cultural Anthropologist) 
Dr. Billings' doctoral research compared the styles of culture in New Hanover and New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. Recently she has worked to develop curriculums relating anthropology to peace studies and international understanding. Her teaching interests include art, cross-cultural psychology, theory and method, millenarian movements, and the Pacific.[More...]
Dr. Angela Demovic (Cultural Anthropologist) 
Dr. Demovic is a sociocultural anthropologist who has conducted fieldwork in Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous island chain that is a part of the east African country of Tanzania. Geographically, her main focus is on the peoples and cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, with a theoretical focus on the intersection of household economics, gender, political change, and the global economy. Angela has also done extensive interview research with sex workers in New Orleans, which has led her to an interest in feminist jurisprudence and the rights of sex workers globally. She has also worked as an applied anthropologist, focusing on the ethical collection of oral histories for National Parks in Hawai'i. [More...]
Dr. David T. Hughes (Archaeological Anthropologist)
Dr. Hughes has been active in anthropology since 1968 and has traveled over much of North America in the interim. During most of his career, he has done contract archaeology, but his interests include matters of socialization and education and all facets of Native American culture and adaptation. His recent projects have included almost ten years of excavation and research at the Buried City sites in the Texas Panhandle and an ethnographic overview of the Pipestone National Monument in Minnesota, including original ethnographic fieldwork and review of historic, ethnographic, and ethnohistoric records about the sacred and profane uses of the pipestone and quarry area by Native Americans. [More...]
Dr. Jens Kreinath (Cultural Anthropologist)
Dr. Kreinath focuses upon theoretical and methodological issues in social and cultural anthropology. As a member of a junior research group on ritual theory and the history of religions, he carried out research on a filmed performance of the Yasna, a daily performed ritual of Zoroastrian high-priests. Together with Refika Sariönder, he conducted fieldwork in Istanbul among the Alevi on the reflexive dynamics of the cem, a weekly observed community ritual. His research interests also include theoretical issues in visual and media anthropology and the aesthetics of ritual performances. His regional focus is on North Africa, Middle East, New Guinea and Central Australia. He is the editor of the volume Ritual and Reflection: Tropes in Transformation and Transgression. [More...]
Dr. Robert Lawless (Cultural Anthropologist) 
Dr. Lawless worked in Southeast Asia for seven years studying urban scavengers in Manila, peasants on the Central Plain of Luzon, and headhunters in the North Luzon Highlands. He has also worked for eight years in New York City researching the social organization of hospitals and the survival strategies of street people. His main teaching and research interests focus on an integration of cognitive and ecological aspects of culture. More recently Dr. Lawless has served as undergraduate coordinator for the Wichita State University Department of Anthropology helping students in the beginnings of their anthropological careers. His most recent fieldwork includes studies of Haitians in Haiti and Florida. [More...]
Dr. Peer H. Moore-Jansen (Biological Anthropologist) 
Currently chair of the department, Dr. Moore-Jansen was a student magister in prehistoric archaeology at the University of Copenhagen from 1972 to 1975. His teaching and research interests include skeletal biology, human variability, the history of evolutionary thought, and general paleoanthropology. Dr. Moore-Jansen conducts research in quantitative variation, microevolution and secular change in the human skeleton, especially as it applies to forensic anthropology and the study of historic and prehistoric population dynamics. For several years he studied dental pathology and microwear, and he participated in the development of the National Forensic Data Bank. He is the current editor-in-chief of the Lambda Alpha Journal. [More...]
Jerry Martin (Museum Director, Museum Studies) 
Director of the Lowell D. Holmes Museum of Anthropology at Wichita State University, Mr. Martin teaches museum related courses. A collector of native art from various areas of the world, he has traveled extensively in the third world. With a donation from Barry and Paula Downing, he has recently acquired for the museum the largest collection of Asmat art in the United States. [More...]
Adjunct Faculty
Ron Dorsey
Ron holds a B.A. (History ‘69) and a M.A. (Anthropology ‘98) from Wichita State University. He has eleven years experience in Plains archaeology and zooarchaeology emphasis on freshwater mussels). He has acted as a “mussel” consultant for several government and private agencies. He has published or provided reports addressing the prehistoric context of freshwater mussels to Central Plains Archaeology, Midwest Journal of Archaeology, KSHS, the Colorado State Historical Society, and the Bureau of Reclamation. Currently, Ron is retired from 35 years of service in public schools as a science/mathematics instructor and has served as a lecturer in archaeology at Wichita State University since 2000.
> Tina L. Bennett-Kastor
> Frederick Hemans
> Schuyler Jones
> Matt Dreher
Emeritus Faculty