Seahawk Athletics
Dodge PerformingSPRING 2026
Dr. Caleb Everett, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware, and a professor of Anthropology, Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Department of Anthropology & Sociology
Distinguished Scholar Series
Caleb Everett is the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware, and a professor of Anthropology, Linguistics and Cognitive Science. His research explores linguistic, cognitive and cultural diversity. It relies on varied methods, from field work in Amazonia, to computational analyses of data from many distinct populations, to experimental tests of the aerosol particles people produce while speaking. This work, much of it involving collaborations with other scholars and students, has appeared in three books and varied journals.
Distinguished Scholar Lecture: Tuesday, February 10, 2026, Cole Cinema 4:45 – 6pm
Title: Exploring the Intersection of Culture, Language and Thought
Abstract
Fundamental differences across the world’s languages can serve as a window into many aspects of human thought. In this talk I survey a number of results demonstrating how crosslinguistic research can better inform our understanding of four key branches
of nonlinguistic cognition: Spatial, temporal, numerical and sensory. These results have accrued primarily in the last two decades, and even in the last few years, underscoring the extent to which languages and cognition can vary across the world’s cultures. I
focus on a series of results discussed in my last two books. The results are the product of the work of dozens of researchers across a variety of disciplines working on many languages in diverse locales. Those results suggest that, far from simply categorizing ideas, objects and relationships in broadly similar ways, languages encode many concepts in non-universal and often esoteric ways. The results suggest as well that linguistic differences both reflect and affect key concepts associated with the four cognitive domains focused on here.
SPRING 2025
Dr. Karen Nakamura, University of California, Berkeley
Anthropology Distinguished Scholar
Schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, etc. are usually framed as severe mental illnesses amenable only to medical treatment. What happens when we view them as biopsychosocial disabilities and rethink them using the social model of community and care?
In this talk, Prof. Karen Nakamura (the Haas Distinguished Chair in Disability Studies at UC Berkeley and author of A Disability of the Soul) talks about her ethnography at Bethel House, an intentional community for people with psychiatric disabilities in Japan. From her fieldwork, she produced a film and book about the possibilities and limitations of rethinking how we deal with the most stigmatized of mental illnesses.
Dr. Jatin Dua, University of Michigan
Visiting Anthropologist Program
Shipping plays a crucial role in global circulation and geopolitical imaginaries of mobility. Approximately 90% of the world’s imports and exports travel by sea on some 93,000 merchant vessels, operated by 1.25 million seafarers, carrying almost six billion tons of cargo. These contemporary shipping routes are built on longer histories of movement from land to sea that brought distant places in relation across vast spaces. Based on fieldwork conducted along these routes of maritime commerce, specifically focusing on ports and shipping lanes in the Bab-el-Mandeb, a narrow strait that separates Africa from Asia and connects the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, this talk explores the possibilities of an anthropology of and from the ocean. Specifically, in this talk, I explore the routing and rerouting of various cargo (from containers to livestock to toxic cargo) and the social worlds constituted on land and sea through shipping as a lens to understanding relations, connections, and disconnections linking Africa to the world. Thinking through rerouting allows for an ethnographic practice attuned not only to the frictions of contemporary life, but the ways ships and social worlds constituted through it, move forward, in unequal and haphazard ways, but forward, nonetheless.
FALL 2024
Erin H. Kimmerle, Ph.D., University of South Florida
Visiting Anthropologist
Dr. Kimmerle’s lecture is based on her recent book, WE CARRY THEIR BONES: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys. She provides a detailed account of Jim Crow America and an indictment of the reform school system as we know it with details from the science of forensic anthropology. Her lecture chronicles the extraordinary efforts taken to bring these lost children home to their families—an endeavor that created a political firestorm and a dramatic reckoning with racism and shame in the legacy of America.
Professor Lisa Lucero
Visiting Speaker
The ancestral Maya in Central America subsisted as farmers for over 4,000 years without destroying their environment because of how they engaged with the it through the lens of their inclusive, non-anthropocentric worldview that resulted in a resilient, sustainable relationship. The Maya collaborated with trees, animals, reptiles, birds, soils, water, and other entities rather than trying to subjugate or control them. This collaboration provided the means for rural farmers to bring tribute to their kings in cities because of what kings provided in exchange—clean water during the five-month dry season. Kings performed ceremonies to the gods and ancestors to ensure there would be enough rain to replenish people, crops, jungle life—and the massive artificial self-cleaning reservoirs that not only provided water but also served as portals to the Underworld where the Maya communed with gods and ancestors and prayed for rain. Some portals, such as natural caves and cenotes, demanded pilgrimages as witnessed at Cara Blanca, Belize, where the Maya built ceremonial buildings, but not houses or cities. Consequently, they left a minimal human footprint. Flora and fauna thus flourished. This type of conservation, self-cleaning reservoirs, and other traditional practices hold lessons that are relevant today.
