News from the SHIRE Lab

Matthew received a summer internship at the prestigious Pew Research Center in Washington D.C. Congratulations Matthew!

Sarah Giusti has been accepted to UConn’s Department of Anthropology graduate program and will be joining the SHIRE Lab in the Fall. Congratulations Sarah!

Minutes after the solar eclipse, honorary hobbit Elic Weitzel, withstood some tough questioning from the Wizard and brilliantly defended his dissertation. Congratulations Dr. Weitzel!

Matthew has taken on an apprentice for the spring term. The SHIRE Lab welcomes Chelsea Betts, who will be learning data analysis in R.

Ben Purzycki received funding from the Templeton Religion Trust for his 3-year ethnographic project Gods, Games, and the Socioecological Landscape. Congratulations Ben!

John Shaver will be moving from the University of Otago to Baylor University in the fall. He has accepted a position as an Associate Professor in Baylor’s exceptional Department of Anthropology. Congratulations John!

Rich will teach Anthropology 5308: Human Evolutionary Theory in the Spring 2024 semester on Mondays, 1:25pm-3:55pm.  

The Wizard’s anthropological memoir, The Ping Pong Player and the Professor, is published by Wildhouse Publications. 

After a long delay, Fatima Saki finally arrives at UConn from the University of Tehran. Welcome Fatima!

New grant from the John Templeton Foundation: Ritual for the Non-Religious: A Research Study with
Practical Applications. With Wesley Wildman of the Center for Mind and Culture (CMAC), Sosis (co-PI)
and Conrad (researcher) will be conducting research aimed at documenting and understanding ritual
practices within SBRN (spiritual but not religious) communities.

Bagel Hour resumes! Bagel Hour will meet biweekly on Wednesdays from 12:15-1:00 p.m. in the
Anthropology Colloquium Room, beginning September 6.

New subgrant from Princeton University: Sport and Spin as Concepts in a Table Tennis Community. This
ethnographic research will extend earlier fieldwork and explore cultural concepts within a diverse
sporting community. This work is funded by a subgrant from Agustin Fuentes and Greg Downey’s
Concepts as a Dynamic Assemblage: Cultural Evolution and the Human Way of Being, which is exploring
new ways to conceptualize and analyze culture within anthropology, philosophy, and cultural evolution.