Faculty

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.

Blakeslee, Donald J.

At WSU since 1976, Dr. Blakeslee specializes in the archaeology of the Great Plains and Midwest. His research interests include exchange systems, dating techniques, ethnohistory, assemblage formation processes, and cognitive archaeology.    Further Biographical Information.

Lowell D. Holmes              News of Dr. Holmes at WSU

In 1967 Dr. Holmes negotiated the split of the department from sociology and then served as the first department chair. He established the Museum of Anthropology (now named the Lowell D. Holmes Museum of Anthropology) and founded Lambda Alpha, the international honors society for anthropology students. His doctoral research consisted of a methodological restudy of Margaret Mead's Samoan work. Dr. Holmes did research in American and Western Samoa in 1954, 1962-1963, 1974, 1976-1977, and 1988. He has worked with Samoan migrants in California in 1977 and 1992-1993. In 1990 he received the National Distinguished Teaching Award from the National Association of Student Anthropology, and in 1968 he received the Kansas Regents Excellence in Teaching Award. His research and teaching interests include methodology, peoples of the Pacific, cultures of the United States, the history of anthropological theory, and cross-cultural gerontology.

David T. Hughes

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.

Robert Lawless

Currently the undergraduate coordinator, Dr. Lawless spent seven years in Southeast Asia doing anthropological research among urban scavengers in Manila, peasants on the Central Plain of Luzon, and headhunters in the North Luzon Highlands. For several years in New York City he investigated the social organization of hospitals and the survival strategies of street people. More recently he has done fieldwork in Haiti and among Haitians in Florida. His research and teaching interests focus on an integration of cognitive and ecological aspects of culture.

Peer Moore-Jansen

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.

Clayton Robarchek

Currently the graduate coordinator, Dr. Robarchek's teaching and research interests include Amazonian ethnology, medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, religion, Southeast Asian ethnology, warfare, and violence and nonviolence. He conducted field research projects among the Semai of West Malaysia and the Waorani of the Ecuadorian Amazon investigating their respectively peaceful and violent cultural orientations. In 1979-1980 he served as Senior Fulbright-Hays Lecturer in Anthropology at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.
Drs. Clay and Carole Robarchek also teach a class which goes to Belize, Central America every year.

Further Biographical Information
Belize Class

Dr. Jacqueline Snyder specializes in U.S. Culture considered cross-culturally and has published in the areas of male-female communication, cultural geography of North America, religion and spirituality, and environmentalism. She teaches the anthropology of American culture, as well as other American culture topics and does individualized work with graduate students interested in deeper exploration of aspects of American culture. She is currently organizing a travel seminar to New Zealand that will focus on Maori culture and environmental resource management issues in that country. (316) 978-689-5920

Adjunct Faculty:

Jerry Martin

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. 

Carole Robarchek

Ms. Robarchek's teaching and research interests include Amazonian ethnology, cultural barriers to education, economic anthropology, kinship, social networks, and Southeast Asian ethnology.
Further Biographical Information

Affiliated Faculty:

Tina L. Bennett-Kastor

After working with deaf children at the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles, Dr. Bennett-Kastor came to WSU in 1978 as a linguist in the Department of English. Her research has focused on language development, especially through the analysis of children's discourse and child-caregiver conversation; on the role of repetition in conversation, discourse, and language development; and on the development of narrative abilities. More recently she has engaged in fieldwork among Irish-speaking preschoolers in the west of Ireland. Her primary interest is the intersections of grammar and discourse.

Deborah A.Gordon

Dr. Gordon came to WSU as a faculty member in women's studies and writes on feminism and cultural studies and feminism and postmodernism in anthropology. Recently she has examined the racial and class politics of feminist ethnography. Her 1995 co-edited volume examines the sexual politics, racial history, and moral dilemmas of ethnographic writing by women anthropologists and women of color in the United States. Presently she is completing a manuscript on A Troubled Border: Feminism and the Literary Turn in Anthropology, which examines the political histories written into feminist and experimental ethnography.