2024-25 Stapleton Recipients

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The Department of Anthropology is excited to announce the recipients of the Stapleton Award for 2024-2025! Please click here for more information about the Stapleton Award

Leah Cundiff

Leah Cundiff
Leah Cundiff, 2024-25 Stapleton Award Recipient

Leah’s Stapleton research is centered around death and funerary practices within New York City. What does death preparation look like within a city bustling with life? Who are the people that spend their lives making the death of others more peaceful?

Lisette Blackstone

Lauren Keohan
Lauren Keohan, 2024-25 Stapleton Recipient

The Stapleton Fellowship enabled Lauren to travel to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to research the effects of tourism on the local ecology and culture. She stayed in an Airbnb near the tourism sector of the city for the month of June while utilizing anthropological fieldwork practices to engage with local businesses, residents, travelers, and workers. Through open-minded adventures, profound conversations and daily exploration, she learned about the complex history and interconnectedness between human existence and the beautiful world that we dependently inhabit. 

Kami Steffenauer

Kami Steffenauer
Kami Steffenauer, 2024-25 Stapleton Award Nominee

Through archival research in Kami’s family’s hometown of Stein am Rhein, Switzerland, she is exploring how rurality and kinship impacted my family’s history and migration decisions – first living in the same town for nearly five centuries and wielding political and military power, then moving to North America and remaining in the same town upon settling in the United States. She will also be conducting oral interviews with her family members and looking through her family’s home archives to see how storytelling and memory preservation impact her family’s geographical identity and the perception of that identity, as well as gender, racial, and class identities. I’m seeking to understand how rural identity impacts storytelling both in individual families and in the communities in which they live, as well as the role family legacy plays in the way rurality shows up in her family’s everyday lives.