Briana Nichols, 2022-2023
Research Interests: Guatemala, Central American Migration
Background: Dr. Briana Nichols is a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anthropology. Her work and interests connect transnational development, critical theories of mobility and indigenous studies. Her dissertation (Imagining un Futuro Digno: Indigenous youth striving for non-migration in Guatemala) explores the impact of migration in Guatemala and how indigenous youth construct futures in communities from which everyone else is leaving. Her work engages with the afterlives of migration and asks how youth fight to remain in their communities of origin. She has published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and is the co-editor and contributing author of a special issue of the International Journal of Refugee Studies.
Jennifer Trowbridge, 2020-2022
Jennifer Trowbridge is a sociocultural and biological anthropologist whose writing and research centers on the intersections between political violence, justice and human rights, and science and technology. Her recent ethnographic research in Colombia focuses on sociopolitical dynamics of forensic scientific investigations to locate, identify, and return the bodies of people killed in human rights violations. Her approach emphasizes relationships between the living and the dead, especially with regards to the dead body within forensic scientific practices and funerary rituals. Trowbridge's ethnographic fieldwork in Colombia was inspired by her years of experience as a lab-based forensic anthropologist in Guatemala, and her time working at a human rights’ advocacy organization in Washington, DC on issues of US policy in Latin America.
Karma Frierson, 2018-2020
Karma joined the Department of African and African-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis as an assistant professor in 2020. Frierson specializes in Afro-Latin American Studies. Her research, an ethnography of the Gulf Coast port city of Veracruz, Mexico, traces how blackness functions as a genealogy, an expectation, and a cultural resource for the regional identity known as jarocho. Since earning her doctorate in anthropology at the University of Chicago in 2018, Frierson was the postdoctoral associate in Latin American Studies at Rutgers University. She has been recognized as a Fulbright Student Scholar, a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow.
