Department celebrates the 2024 Bigel Grant Awardees

This September, the Anthropology Department hosted a Welcome Back event for faculty and students to reconnect after a summer season of research and field experiences. The highlight of the event were presentations by seven students who were awarded research grants from the department through the Antoinette C. Bigel Scholarship Fund.

Tori Sutera, AJ Humenik, Emily Papagiannis, and Lucas Gonzalez were awarded grants to participate in the 2024 Native American and Indigenous Studies field school run by MSU’s NAIS program. Natalia Orlovski used her Bigel award to be part of a Global Treks and Adventures internship program in Iceland where she researched and visited several amazing cultural and heritage sites. Ellie Paschalis was able to travel to the Basque country in Spain to participate in the Aditu Archaeological Field School which is focused on the recovery and study of human remains from a medieval-period ossuary. Khara Brown also traveled for an archeological field at James Madison’s Montpelier, the planation of America’s fourth president. Khara’s program studied and excavated at the site to better understand the enslaved community who labored and sustain the plantation in the 19th century.

The student reports were outstanding and clearly demonstrated the special opportunities available to Anthropology students thanks to their access to the Bigel scholarship fund.