The Department of Sociology and Anthropology is excited to welcome 4 new faculty and staff starting in 2025.
Taylor Braswell, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Ph.D. in Sociology. Northeastern University
Taylor Braswell researches the social, environmental, and political economic dynamics of urbanization and infrastructure development in the United States. His recent and ongoing projects examine topics that include the environmental justice dimensions of energy infrastructure, the role of urban-rural spatial politics in shaping infrastructure governance, and the drivers of growth in the wildland urban interface.
Tony Chamoun, Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar in Anthropology
Ph.D. in Anthropology, Syracuse University
Tony Chamoun’s work broadly centers on how the politics of difference shape and are shaped by biocultural bodies. As an historical bioanthropologist, Tony engages the articulations and materializations of estrangement, race, and religious sectarianism through decedents of an early modern/modern cemetery from the port city of Beirut, Lebanon. Relatedly, future research sets out to examine the production of difference via bodies moving not only into the Middle East, as in the case of Beirut, but also bodies moving outside it, as afforded by the geographies of ports in the thick of modern empire. Tony has been involved in projects in North America, South America, and the Middle East. An earlier article entitled “Caring Differently: Some Reflections” is published in the journal Historical Archaeology (2020). His forthcoming chapter, “Violent Histories in a Diasporic Register: Between Bodily Durabilities, Sacrificial Others, and Racialized Strangers,” will appear in an edited volume from SAR/University of New Mexico Press.
Kevin Kiley, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Ph.D. in Sociology, Duke University
Kevin Kiley is a cultural sociologist whose research focuses on the social and cognitive sources of belief and opinion stability over the life course. He uses quantitative and computational methods to understand how human cognition interacts with the external “scaffolding” of the social world, especially organizations and groups, to store and create cultural meaning. He was raised in North Carolina and loves the state deeply.
Katherine Kinkopf, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Ph.D. in Anthropology, University of California Berkeley
Katie Kinkopf is an anthropologist whose research investigates the biocultural histories of disability and chronic illness in the historic and prehistoric past using archival documents and human skeletal remains. She is interested in developing analytic approaches that foreground disability rather than erase it. Her forthcoming book outlines a “crip archaeology” that introduces bio/archaeologists to disability studies, offers alternatives to medicalizing ways of thinking about disability issues, and provides a framework that aligns with the Disability Justice movement.
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