Welcome! 

I am delighted to share some of the many recent things that have been happening with students, faculty, and alumni in our department. To learn what anthropology is and to get a sense of who we are as a department, please see our Mission and Goals statement or the About Anthropology page. We support our queer students and colleagues and stand against racism. In addition to the material in our most recent newsletter, there are several other exciting developments to report:
 

• This past spring the Anthropology Graduate Student Association hosted Mythri Jagethesan as the 2024 installment of the Distinguished Lecture Series. In Spring of 2025, the department will host the third Bluegrass Annual Discussions on Anthropology and Social Sciences. This student-run conference will contain presentations, posters and a keynote address organized around the topic of decolonization.
• Our NAGPRA efforts, led by NAGPRA coordinator Celise Fricker, have expanded with the hiring of an assistant coordinator (Marcus Rodriguez), an assistant curator (Alex Patterson), and a bioarchaeologist (Lucy Garrison). Welcome Marcus, Alex, and Lucy!
   
• Thanks to funding from the Donovan Trust, we now have tables in the Atrium of Lafferty Hall and wall art in the hallways. We also have new windows and a sprinkler system.
• The construction of the EduceLab within the William S. Webb Museum is now complete! Anthropologists Hugo Reyes-Centeno and George Crothers serve as EduceLab co-PIs.
• We have a full schedule of departmental colloquia and Anthropology Brown Bag presentations, usually one every Friday at noon.
• In the fall of 2024 we welcomed a new professor of biological anthropology, Dr. John Schultz, and a new research post-doc, Dr. Morgan Farrell. 

Thanks for tuning in, and please stop by to say hello (I am in room 204a of Lafferty Hall) if you find yourself on the UK campus.

Scott Hutson, Chair