Alumni Stories

I graduated from SIUC with a double major in English and Anthropology. When I graduated, I had no idea what I was going to do. Since my undergrad days, I’ve been interested in researching and advocating for social justice. Seven years later, that landed me at IIT Chicago-Kent School of Law with a full ride to get my JD.

I’m early in my law school career, but already I’ve helped people expunge or seal their criminal records and assisted elderly citizens with filling out the power of attorney forms. I went into law school with an interest in disability advocacy (and I’m the 1L representative for the Disability Advocacy Student Association), but I also have my eye on labor law, criminal law, and public policy.

Majoring in anthropology gave me a foundation that’s unique in law—one that’s built with compassion and cultural sensitivity that is sorely needed in the world right now. I’m still not 100% sure what type of law I want to go into, but my foundation in anthropology informs the lawyer I want to be regardless of the legal field I end up in.

I graduated SIUC with a double major in English and Anthropology. When I graduated, I had no idea what I was going to do. Since my undergrad days, I’ve been interested in researching and advocating for social justice. Seven years later, that landed me at IIT Chicago-Kent School of Law with a full ride to get my JD.

I’m early in my law school career, but already I’ve helped people expunge or seal their criminal records and assisted elderly citizens with filling out power of attorney forms. I went into law school with an interest in disability advocacy (and I’m the 1L representative for the Disability Advocacy Student Association), but I also have my eye on labor law, criminal law, and public policy.

Majoring in anthropology gave me a foundation that’s unique in law—one that’s built with compassion and cultural sensitivity that is sorely needed in the world right now. I’m still not 100% sure what type of law I want to go into, but my foundation in anthropology informs the lawyer I want to be regardless of the legal field I end up in.

A year ago, I began my museum career as the Education and Outreach Coordinator at the Seward House Museum in Auburn, New York. This amazing historic house holds an almost-entirely original collection (which is very rare) from the Seward family. William H. Seward was the Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, and is most famed for his purchase of Alaska. Frances Miller Seward was a national changemaker in the abolitionist and women's rights movements, and used her home as a stop on the Underground Railroad. In my position, I am tasked to create programming for school students, give educational tours to the public, design and implement new exhibits, and have a really positive impact on the public. The Seward House Museum is closely tied with the Harriet Tubman Home, as the Sewards befriended and supported Tubman before and after the Civil War. Seneca Falls, a focal point in the early women's rights movement, is just a few miles away, and this entire area of New York is incredibly rich in American history. Our museum has been a National Historic Landmark for over 50 years and continues to have a massive impact on the surrounding community. After graduating from SIU, I imagined working in a small history museum with a powerful legacy would be my dream job. Now, as I continue my career at the Seward House Museum, I know I have met my initial goal and am excited to continue growing from my anthropological roots!

Since graduating from SIU with her Master’s in Anthropology in 2009, Kaitlin Fertaly completed a PhD in Geography at the University of Colorado, Denver, continuing her research on women’s household practices in post-Soviet Armenia. Currently, Dr. Fertaly is the Evaluation Services Director at the Rural Institute for Inclusive Communities at the University of Montana. She is a qualitative researcher and evaluator whose work focuses on understanding community needs and improving systems to address health equity and access to services, particularly for women, families, and communities that have been historically marginalized.

Hi, my name is Andrew Van Cleve! I graduated from SIU in 2017 with a B.A. in Anthropology, and a minor in Forensic Science.

After graduation, I worked at the Center for Archaeological Investigations, where I learned how to do archaeological surveys and site recording, helped with archaeological reports, and acquired all the basic skills an archaeologist needs. This led to several summer seasonal jobs with the National Park Service as an archaeological technician at El Malpais National Monument in New Mexico. I helped to record dozens of unrecorded sites including many within some of the lava tubes at the monument. Currently, I am employed by Archaeology Southwest, and attached to Tonto National Monument in Arizona, as a Restoration Archaeologist. I help to protect the nearly 100 archaeological sites within the monument and monitor damage from the 2019 Woodbury Fire that burned through most of the park. I draw upon my knowledge and experience from SIU and the CAI nearly every day in my work.

Michaela Hoots graduated from SIU Carbondale with a Liberal Arts bachelor's degree in Anthropology. She began attending East Carolina University's Maritime History Master's Program in the Fall of 2020. She has since begun her training in Maritime archaeology, which involves the necessary skillset of diving and performing excavation on underwater sites. Her thesis research focuses on curated material culture representing foodways that were recovered from a shipwreck called La Concorde/Queen Anne's Revenge, found off the coast of North Carolina. These artifacts provide information on three distinct social groups that lived, worked, and were enslaved aboard this vessel—the French La Concorde crew, enslaved Africans, and pirates.

Each of these groups retrieved, prepared, and ate their food in diverse ways, and Michaela intends to specifically research aspects of these habits aboard the now-sunken ship. After completing her thesis, Michaela hopes to further he knowledge and experience in the conservation of maritime artifacts.

My research interests include ritual, religion, and politics, ethnic minorities of Southwest China, and the emerging of global interest in the cultural and creative industry in relation to language, music, and media arts in China.

I conduct most of my research in the Cool Mountains (Liangshan) in Sichuan Province, China.

My field research began with my M.A. study of the fire ceremony or torch festival (dutzie) among the Yi people and has developed during my Ph.D years into a more comprehensive inquiry into several types of Yi magico-religious practices, the lived experience of Yi shaman-priests, and the interface between ritual and social change. More recently, I have extended my concern from mountainous Yi-dwelling communities to ethnically mixed urban areas in Liangshan and Chengdu and became interested in how senses and social memory are experienced in trajectories of interethnic contact and how these interwoven dynamics influence and shape the emerging co-creation processes in cultural tourism.

I teach courses on language, culture and society, ritual studies, anthropology of tourism, anthropology of popular culture, and selected topics on Yi studies.

Following the completion of my PhD in Biological Anthropology, I am now teaching classes in the four fields of Anthropology at a community college in Chicagoland. The smaller size classes of community colleges make teaching even more enjoyable and meaningful as you built closer and stronger connections with the students. Smaller size classes allow you to complement your teaching with much more in-class activities and hands-on learning. It is my first-year teaching at a community college, and so far, I’m enjoying it!

Getting a degree in Anthropology at SIU gave me the opportunity to acquire many years of teaching experience in the different fields of Anthropology as a teaching assistant, but also as an instructor of record! Through my time at SIU, I have learnt how to engage and challenge students in my class despite divergent backgrounds, skill levels, and educational goals. My field research experience studying macaques in Thailand has been a great addition to my teaching material by providing students with real-life examples from fieldwork research and a chance to be in the position of a researcher.

Leo Vournelis is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Baruch College in New York, where he teaches a wide variety of anthropology classes including Urban Anthropology, Anthropology of Technology and Anthropology of Science Fiction. He has published several articles on the Greek Crisis, and continues to research the role of antiquity, money and politics in the transformation of Greek society.