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University of Alabama Department of Anthropology

The Anthropology program at UA offers a Master's Degree in any of the subfields of anthropology:  Archaeology, Cultural Anthropology, Linguistics, and Physical Anthropology.

IN addition, it offers a Doctoral Degree either in the Archaeology of the Complex Societies of the Americas, or in Biocultural Medical Anthropology.

The campus

The University of Alabama is famous for its football program, but while others are watching the games, I can't take my eyes off the architecture and natural beauty of the campus and of Tuscaloosa.

This is the main building of the College of ARts and Sciences.

My adviser is Dr. William W. Dressler. a medical anthropologist whose interests include culture theory, community studies, cultural domain analysis, and  the relationship between culture and disease risk.

Much of his work has been done in Brazil and in Southeastern United States.

Master's Fieldwork

My thesis fieldwork ws done in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia during the summer of 2014. The goal of the research was to determine whether young men share a cultural model for goals they should be pursuing between the ages of 19 and 25.

Semi-structured interviews, free-listing, pile-sorting, and surveys were used to gather data for domain analysis.

The results will be written up as a Master's Thesis for the spring of 2015, and presented in the poster section of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology.

Whatley booths
PhD Fieldwork

My dissertation research uses a cognitive anthropological approach for the topic of health disparities between Black and White Americans in the South. In a preliminary study, I used cultural domain analysis to identify the most important elements of shared cultural models--how people think things are, or should be--in regard to overarching life goals, family, lifestyle, and social support.
This is being followed by a small case-control study using in-depth interviews to explore the lived experiences of of women whose lives may or may not be consonant with the models envisioned by their community. The sample is divided by race and by hypertensive status, to make insights possible into how such experiences might inform or be informed by racial identity and health.

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