Doctoral
Students

Amanda Althoff is an archaeologist who focuses on material culture, museum collections, and human-animal relations. Her doctoral research examines objects depicting insects made by Yup’ik and Inupiaq artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Western Alaska. Working across museum collections, archives, and oral and material sources, she studies how objects were collected, classified, and interpreted, and how these histories have shaped archaeological knowledge. Her work is particularly inspired by questions of archaeological theory, critical animal studies, and Indigenous archaeology.

 Althoff, A. (2024). Powerful Worms: Insects in 19th century Yup'ik and Inupiaq Material Culture. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 39(1):  https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.118232

Seb's research focuses on themes of identity, meaning-making and relationship to land within the Black diaspora and beyond. Trained as an archaeologist (B.A. in Archaeological Studies, Yale University, 2024) with fieldwork experience in a wide variety of ecological, cultural and geopolitical contexts

(including Western Europe, Southern Africa, the Northern Andes, the Caribbean and

western North America), Seb seeks to apply archaeometric methods to complex cultural, historical and environmental questions. His graduate research at Columbia focuses on the archaeology of marronage, fugitivity and resistance throughout the Americas, with an emphasis on the Caribbean and the Southeastern United States.

Evin works in southern and south-central Africa, where she explores how the human-animal relationship manifests during the Iron Age. She couples taphonomic and traditional zooarchaeological analyses to examine the ways that humans, animals, and associated technologies shape the lives and bodies of one another and the socioeconomic implications therein.

Alexandra draws on archives and bioarchaeology to understand questions of race, power and community building. Her work focuses on the political economy of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and it’s implications for the movement of Black Communities throughout the United States. She received her master’s in Public Anthropology from American University in 2021, where her research focused on the history and applications of Black Feminist Archaeology. Her current research focuses on interactions between Free and Enslaved Black Communities in Western Maryland during the 18th and 19th century. This work incorporates osteological analysis, alongside ethnographic research with present day descendant communities.

Brendon is interested in questions of urbanism, including labor investment, structural deviation, and layout patterns in both monumental and domestic sectors of ancient urban centers on the north coast of Peru. He would like to compare the urban centers of the Moche Valley and its adjacent highlands, informing differences in urbanism between the highlands and coast. He intends to utilize aerial drone photography, photogrammetry, and GIS to better understand the development of political complexity and urbanism in the Moche Valley, resulting in a more nuanced understanding of Moche politics.

Milan is a historical archaeologist with interests in Black geographies, queer studies, and community-based participatory research. Her project is based on various household archaeologies of Latta Place, a former plantation in Huntersville, NC. Additionally, she is trained in human and non-human animal osteoarchaeology, and has written on mourning rituals, alternative kinship structures, and autoethnography. Milan received her B.A. in Anthropology and Archaeology from Cornell University in 2024 where she completed an honors thesis as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. She is now a Provost Doctoral Fellow and serves as the graduate mentor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship at Barnard College.

Emre specializes in the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic cultures of Southwest Asia. With a focus on archaeological theory, he engages critically with the methodologies and frameworks that shape our understanding of material culture in the deep past. Queer feminism forms the foundation of his analytical framework, informing his broader engagements with new materialism, posthumanism, multi-species archaeologies, and archaeopolitics.

Committed to fostering a scholarly environment that foregrounds diversity and inclusivity, Emre explores ways of generating alternative stories that challenge mainstream narratives both on (pre)historical and contemporary levels. He has published in journals such as Cambridge Archaeological Journal and Science, and currently is a PhD Student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University.

Sarah Elaebrak is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, specializing in zooarchaeology. Her research focuses on the archaeology of Egypt and Sudan, with interests in other regions of Africa and Western Asia. She is particularly interested in ancient environments, foodways and provisioning, urban life, and the archaeology of empires, using faunal remains to explore relationships among people, animals, and imperial infrastructure in the past. She received her BA in anthropology and political science from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Miriam Entin is a PhD candidate in Archaeological Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research examines the relationship between Jewish ritual, material culture, and urban space, with a particular focus on mikva’ot (ritual baths) in Lower Manhattan between 1850 and 1950. Drawing on archaeological evidence, fire insurance maps, Yiddish-language newspapers, and other archival sources, her dissertation explores how Jewish communities built, maintained, and adapted mikva’otwithin the dense and rapidly changing urban landscape of New York City.

Kyle’s work is focused on how communities remake urban environments in times of precarity and moments of collapse. His past work highlighted the building strategies of a houseless community remaking urban realities under the BQE during the COVID-19 pandemic. Kyle’s current work is concerned with a community dismantling and reusing the original Dutch East India Company’s (V.O.C.) fortress, Kasteel Batavia, built in Jakarta, Indonesia during the 17th century. Kyle’s work is concerned with how ad-hoc architectural and engineering building strategies articulate the political imaginations of those experiencing environmental, political and social precarity/collapse within urban space.

Francisco Maury is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation examines the ceramics of Comalcalco, Tabasco, to refine the site’s chronology and better understand its place in the wider Maya world. At the American Museum of Natural History, he is carrying out the first formal cataloguing of the Comalcalco collection, which entered the museum following excavations in 1956 and 1957 and remained largely unsorted for decades. His broader interests include the research potential of legacy museum collections and the ethical questions surrounding their stewardship, interpretation, and display.

Amanda is a historical archaeologist whose research interests include cultural heritage studies, hegemonic sociopolitical narratives, collective memory, community-participatory approach, and imperial systems in early modern an modern Eastern Europe. Her project applies an interdisciplinary approach to post-Yugoslav cultural heritage to examine post-conflict negotiations between ethno-religious groups, as well as and the urban material and linguistic counter-narratives surrounding heritage sites. 

Amanda earned her BA from SUNY Albany, where she specialized in Postclassic Maya zooarchaeology. She has also worked in Northeast American CRM archaeology and trained in Icelandic zooarchaeology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Kristen M. Delatour is an archaeologist interested in enslaved labor surrounding the production, preservation and consumption of food. She received an M.A. in Historical Archaeology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and a B.A. in anthropology from the City College of NY. Kristen has developed a focus in Afro-diasporic archaeology within the Northeastern United States and Caribbean. Drawing from zooarchaeological and archival sources, she uses environmental plantation materialities to make sense of experiences of chattel slavery. Kristen has experience within digital public history, turning archaeological content into accessible media within African American & Afro-Indigenous histories within New York and New England. She is passionate about how Black food histories reverberate into the present.

Karina Osorio enrolled in the Anthropology doctoral program at the CUNY Graduate Center in the fall of 2026. She is interested in the formation of early Maya cities, more specifically she’s fascinated with early monumental groups called E Groups, which may have acted as solar observatories and helped bring populations together. She also has interests in landscape archaeology. She presented “Analyzing LiDAR data of Bijo, Guatemala” at the Queens College Summer Research Symposium and has conducted archaeological research in the Peten lakes region in Northern Guatemala.