FACULTY RESEARCH:

FACULTY RESEARCH:

In addition to their teaching responsibilities, all of BU’s anthropology faculty are active researchers in their various subdisciplines. The anthropology faculty believe that research not only promotes their own professional development, but also makes them better classroom teachers. The faculty draw upon their field experiences to illustrate points they want to make in the classroom. By being involved in research, the anthropology faculty can impart to their students a sense of what being a professional anthropologist is. Faculty research helps anthropology majors by informing and preparing them for what will be expected of them in graduate school or in employment opportunities. BU anthropology majors have also had the opportunity to work with individual faculty in research. This has on occasion produced presentations by students at regional conferences or publications in professional journals.

For example, Dr. Aleto's area of expertise includes the archaeology and ethnography of Mesoamerica and South America. He has conducted research on La Puna Island, Ecuador, where he has excavated early prehistoric and early Spanish period sites. In addition, he has traveled widely in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras, studying and photographing most of the significant ruin sites. He has built an impressive collection of slides with which he illustrates his classes, especially 46.310, Mayas and Aztecs. More recently he has embarked on a program of visual anthropology, documenting through photographs the ways of life of modern indigenous peoples in Mexico and Ecuador. His special interest is folk art and ritual celebrations, including the Day of the Dead. He uses these slides to illustrate lectures in 46.370, Indigenous Peoples of Modern Mexico, and 46.450, Peoples and Cultures of South America. In 1998 he expanded the focus of his photographic documentation to the migrant workers of rural Pennsylvania. His work in visual anthropology has resulted in two exhibitions of photographs: "Retratos Mexicanos/Mexican Portraits" and "Unfamiliar Faces: Migrant Workers in Rural Pennsylvania."

Dr. Dauria, Dept. Chairperson, a cultural anthropologist, has focused her research on questions of ethnic identity in American life. American culture is a rich mix of different ethnic and regional subcultures, but not all Americans choose to emphasize their ethnic backgrounds. To see what motivates Americans to emphasize their ethnicity, Dr. Dauria has studied the competition between Americans of Italian and Hispanic ethnicity in a town in upstate New York which has suffered over the last twenty years from "deindustrialization," the loss of industry and factory jobs. Dr. Dauria has plans to continue her research in Pennsylvania, and she is also inquiring into joint research in Puerto Rico with members of the Languages & Cultures department. She is also working with Hispanic labor migrants in the Bloomsburg area.

Dr. Minderhout is trained in both linguistics and cultural anthropology. He has conducted research with several different populations including working class West Indians on the Caribbean island of Tobago, with people of German descent in southeastern Pennsylvania, and with schoolchildren in the Bloomsburg area. Early in his career, his research focus was two-fold, creole languages in the West Indies and child language acquisition among third and fourth graders in the U.S. More recently he has looked at the ways people interpret health and illness in different cultures. One of his research concerns is the cultural barriers to the delivery of health care in the United States. Among the courses he teaches are 46.350, Medical Anthropology, and 46.440, Languages & Culture.

Dr. Quintyn's specialty includes forensic anthropology, human osteology, and human paleontology. His dissertation work centered on the origins of modern humans in the Levant. He has participated in excavations at Qafzeh Cave and Hayonim Cave. In addition, he has conducted metrical and non-metrical research on skeletal materials located at the Peabody Museum, Harvard University; Duckworth Collection, Cambridge University; National History Museum, London; Musee le L'homme, Paris; Department of Anatomy and Anthropology, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv; and Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem. Dr. Quintyn worked for one year as a forensic Anthropologist at the U.S. Army Central I.D. Lab (now called Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command). He has done U.S. service member skeletal recovery in Papua New Guinea, Laos, Vietnam, and Korea. Courses he teaches are 46.220, Human Origins; 46.101, Intro to Anthropology; and 46.495, Forensic Anthropology.

Dr. Warner is a broadly trained cultural anthropologist who primarily specializes in gender, migration, war, Q’eqhi’ Maya peoples, and health. She has worked with Salvadoran women refugees in the United States, Q’eqchi’, K’iche’, Mam, and K’anjobal refugees in an United Nations refugee camp in Campeche, Mexico, and migrant Mexican and Central American farmworkers in Pennsylvania. Her primary interests in medical anthropology include the delivery of biomedical services, nutrition, and culture-specific idioms of distress. Dr. Warner conducted her doctoral work in a refugee camp in Mexico where she studied gender and ethnic differences in the expression of traumatic stress and social support networks in the refugee community. Recently, she has been part of a research project that documents the family histories of Asian, European, and Middle Eastern immigrants to Veracruz, Mexico. In addition to delivering medical services to migrant farmworkers, Dr. Warner also does applied work in educational anthropology, promoting the discipline at the preschool and elementary school levels. She directed a preschool anthropology program for which Bloomsburg University students Abigail Thomas and Lindsay Waros won second place for a poster at the 2004 Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meetings. She also co-directed a program that brought the thrill of archaeology to a summer camp for children with special needs. The program was featured in a poster presented by former student Annie Beisswanger that won first prize at the 2001 Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meetings. Dr. Warner is passionate about mentoring students to succeed in the discipline by gaining admission to the best graduate programs in Anthropology or developing applied interests that lead to the jobs of their dreams! Students that Dr. Warner mentored have attended graduate programs at SUNY Buffalo, Temple, CUNY, Chicago, Florida, Illinois Urbana-Champagne, Syracuse, Nevada-Las Vegas, and George Washington, have received prizes such as the NEAA Student Paper Prize and the Lambda Alpha Dean’s List Award, and regularly present their research at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Northeastern Anthropology Association, and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists.

Dr. Wymer is an archaeologist specializing in the Native American Hopewell culture of Ohio. The Hopewell are well known in the prehistoric record for the huge earthworks they constructed around 2000 years ago in what is now Ohio and contiguous states. Dr. Wymer has worked at several famous Ohio sites, including the Serpent Mound and the Great Circle Park, and her work has been featured in National Geographic. The Hopewell are little understood, and Dr. Wymer has been trying to understand the Hopewell use of agriculture and ritual in their culture. Dr. Wymer also is known for her work with a mastodon recovered in Ohio a few years ago. A paleoethnobotanist, Dr. Wymer is trained to interpret plant remains in archaeological sites; for example, she examined a well-preserved piece of the mastodon’s gut to determine what it ate. In addition, Dr. Wymer has started a long-term research project investigating the local archaeology of the middle reaches of the Susquehanna River valley. Thus far, two sites have been excavated, spanning the past 9,000 years of human occupation (see Summer Fieldschool in Archaeology section). Recently, Dr. Wymer developed 46.360, Pseudoscience, a course which examines ESP, psychic readings, UFO’s, and other widely believed phenomena in American life for which there is no scientific proof, as part of her commitment to debunking common myths. Among the other courses she teaches are 46.300, Archaeological Method & Theory, and 46.311, the Archaeology of the Northeastern U.S.