Departmental News

The Department of Anthropology welcomes two new colleagues who are joining us in Fall 2008, Dr. Christian Tryon in Archaeology and Dr. Noelle Stout in Sociocultural Anthropology/Culture and Media.   We look forward to their contributions over the coming years.

Christian Tryon comes as an Assistant Professor in Archaeology.  He was previously a Research Collaborator at the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Institution and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology at George Washington University.  Professor Tryon is a Paleolithic archaeologist, specializing in lithic technology, raw material provenance, and geoarchaeology. His research aims to understand the cultural, evolutionary and geological context of early modern human behavior during the Middle and Late Stone Age of East Africa.  His most recent major contribution is a detailed study of the tephostratigraphy and lithic technology at the important late Middle Pleistocene locality of Kapthurin in Kenya, to better understand the nature of the transition from the Acheulian to the Middle Stone Age.  He has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Kenya, Turkey, France and North America, and has ongoing and planned field projects at sites in East Africa.

Noelle Stout is coming as an Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow this Fall while on leave for the year, and she will become Assistant Professor of Anthropology in Fall 2009.  Professor Stout is a Sociocultural Anthropologist, receiving her PhD from Harvard University in 2008 and an MA in 1999 from Stanford University.  She joins the Program in Culture and Media as a filmmaker and visual anthropologist and also brings to the Department a specialization in gender and sexuality and late-socialist Cuba.  Professor Stout conducted her dissertation research in Cuba, during which time she filmed her documentary Luchando (2006) which has been shown in numerous international film festivals.   Based on her doctoral research, Luchando chronicles the lives of queer sex-workers in Havana.  Professor Stout’s next film will explore race and citizenship in the Cherokee Nation of Havana.