Leadership Team
Dr. Margriet Haagsma
Professor of Classics. History, Classics, and Religious Studies.
Dr. Margriet Haagsma
Margriet Haagsma teaches the archaeology and history of ancient Greece. She is co-director of the Kastro Kallithea Archaeological Project (KKAP) and, most recently, the Central Achaia Phthiotis Survey (CAPS), a SSHRC-funded archaeological fieldwork project on mainland Greece with a strong focus on community participation and experiential learning in an international setting. She supervised more than 20 graduate students, has published widely in her field, organized conferences, exhibitions, and co-edited a book critically assessing the impact of Ancient Greek culture on the formation of European Identities. She is Co-Director of The Future of the Past signature area in the Faculty of Arts, along with Professor Pamela Willoughby of the Department of Anthropology.
Dr. Pamela Willoughby
Professor and Chair. Anthropology.
Dr. Pamela Willoughby
Pamela Willoughby is a specialist in Palaeolithic archaeology, the study of the oldest human cultural record. It relies on studying the material culture of these early humans and how it changed over time - from the earliest stone tools from Africa dated to around 2.6 million years ago until the end of the Ice Ages around 12,000 years ago. Since 2006, she has conducted archaeological and heritage field research in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania, concentrating on the Iringa Region. She is interested in the preservation of the past, both natural and cultural. She is the Co-Director of The Future of the Past signature area in the Faculty of Arts, along with Professor Margriet Haagsma of the Department of History and Classics.
Signature Area Members
Dr. Anne Bissonnette
Associate Professor. Human Ecology.
Dr. Anne Bissonnette
Dr. Bissonnette is a dress historian with a PhD in Museum Studies & History. In her career, she has curated or co-curated over fifty exhibitions and has won international awards. She has worked on numerous exhibitions in North America and in Europe and acted as a consultant for exceptional institutions both small and large, from the Peloponnesian Folklore Foundation to the National Gallery of Canada. Her work is in the field of material culture studies, curatorship and dress history. Her research focus is fashion from the late eighteenth century to the present day, with a special interest for the cut and construction of clothing, how the body and clothes interact, and on the convergence between art, fashion and science.
Dr. M. Elizabeth Betsy Boone
Professor. Art & Design.
Dr. M. Elizabeth Betsy Boone
Betsy Boone is a professor of the History of Art, Design, and Visual Culture who studies nineteenth and early twentieth-century art in the United States, Spain, and Latin America. She is the author of Vistas de España: American Views of Art and Life in Spain, 1860-1914 (Yale University Press, 2007) and “The Spanish Element in Our Nationality”: Spain, America, and the World’s Fairs and Centennial Celebrations, 1876-1915 (Penn State University Press, 2019), in addition to numerous articles on art, photography, and print culture in western Europe and the Americas. Her specializations include trans-national relations and national identity, exhibitions and display, and the representation of animals.
Pamela Mayne Correia
Faculty Service Officer III, Curator. Anthropology.
Pamela Mayne Correia
As a practicing forensic anthropologist, I am faced with human remains relating to First Nations individuals in a medicolegal context. In my capacity applying my discipline, I work with the provincial and city policing agencies to establish the biographical information for the individuals when located in unmarked graves. Often these remains are not recent and as a result I have been involved in the repatriation of Indigenous remains to communities throughout the province, as well as working with the Goverment of Alberta, to contribute to the discussion of reburial within the province as per the "Working Group" for reconciliation. Beyond this I have supported the research of Tonya Simpson that has looked into violence against Indigenous women from the perspective of injury and perpetrator.
Dr. Sandra Garvie-Lok
Associate Professor. Anthropology.
Dr. Sandra Garvie-Lok
I am a bioarchaeologist, researching past lives through human skeletal remains. I received my BA (Anthropology) from the University of Winnipeg and my MA and PhD (Archaeology) from the University of Calgary. I joined the University of Alberta Department of Anthropology in 2003. My research uses stable isotope analysis, skeletal pathology and mortuary analysis to study diet, health and mobility in the past. I've done most of this research on Iron Age – Ottoman era Greece and Neolithic – Bronze Age China. Our choices of what to eat, where to live and how to be memorialized after we die all involve relationships with the material world. These relationships are written on the body, influencing our tissue chemistry and health. In both Greece and China the state could influence daily life, encouraging a new crop or founding a new city. However we also see long-term local persistence of some dietary and mortuary practices, suggesting that people maintained relationships with the material world that made sense to them.
Shirley Harpham
Archaeology Tech. Anthropology.
As support staff in archaeology, I am available and happy to provide technical and other support to the group as needed. Areas of competency include lab and collection care including museum standards and practices, database design and maintenance, website (Google and Sitecore) and social media management, and safety and emergency preparedness. Other capabilities include faunal analysis, educational and outreach programming, event coordination, and volunteer and staff management.
Dr. John W. (Jack) Ives
Professor. Anthropology.
Dr. Ives’ interests lie in Plains, Subarctic, Great Basin and Northeast Asian prehistory (Palaeolithic, Jin Dynasty), archaeological theory (kinship and economic organization), Paleoindian studies, and Public Archaeology. He is currently investigating the Promontory Caves of Utah for traces of Dene ancestors who had left Subarctic Canada and were on their way to becoming the Navajo and Apaches of the American Southwest. Ives maintains the Western Canadian Fluted Point Database, is working with MA and PhD students on Besant and Sonota archaeological sites in Canada and the United States, and is conducting research at the University of Alberta’s Mattheis Ranch north of Brooks, Alberta. From 2008-2019, he served as the founding Director of the Institute of Prairie Archaeology.
Dr. Beverly Lemire
Professor & Henry Marshall Tory Chair. History, Classics, and Religious Studies.
I publish and research in the interdisciplinary area of historical material culture, exploring the agency of things in the context of colonial, imperial and interconnected global histories (c. 1600-1900). My interest is in objects of everyday resonance, as well as material processes from the politics of smoking tobacco to white-washing laundry (c.1600-1900). I explore issues of gender, rank and race through object systems, with special attention to quotidian media and subaltern populations.
Dr. Arlene Oak
Associate Professor. Material Culture.
Arlene's background is in design practice (dress, furniture, graphics), collections-based activities (Alberta Art Foundation, Royal Alberta Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum), history of design and material culture (MA, Royal College of Art & Victoria & Albert Museum), and the social psychology of design practice (PhD, Cambridge). Her research focuses on the discursive aspects of material culture with studies ranging from ethnographic investigations of architecture practice to explorations of evaluation in TV shows that feature the material world (e.g. Grand Designs, What Not to Wear). She has published in the Journal of Design History, Co-Design, Discourse & Society, Design Studies, and Popular Communication. Her work connects to this area through an interest in the creation and interpretation of material things.
Dr. Joseph F. Patrouch
Professor. History, Classics, and Religious Studies.
As a historian of early modern Europe, I am fully engaged with the creation on narrative of the past, both through archival research and in my teaching.
I have experience teaching and administering in a Public History program and have co-curated multiple exhibitions, including "Salt, Sword and Crozier" at the Peel Library, Oesterreich-Ungarn in Waffen" at the Rutherford Library, and "Forgotten Fronts" with the University Museums. I served for a number of years on the University's Museums Policy and Planning Committee as a GFC rep and became acquainted with the University's museum collections.
Dr. PearlAnn Reichwein
Professor. Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation
I am a historian and heritage specialist at the University of Alberta. My research program highlights Canada's social and environmental history, particularly in western Canada and mountain regions. Understanding the history of people, parks, and politics is the purpose of this research. My scholarship examines cultural landscapes, governance, and commemoration. It historicizes people and parks as well as sense of place and heritage. Mountain parks are a major focus of my research. Cultural production of parks and landscapes through many means, from mountaineering and hydro dams to artwork and horse travel, is the compass of my exploration seeing landscapes as temporally and cross-culturally discursive places of social memory. Reading cultural production through outdoor pursuits suggests the complex constructions of identities, place, region, and nation synthesized through the historical movement of people and ideas. Writing the first cultural resource management plan signed for Banff National Park and guiding hikes at the Plain of Six Glaciers are part of my practitioner experience in a UNESCO World Heritage Site. My early work with Parks Canada dealt with public history, cultural resource policy and planning, federal heritage resources, National Historic Sites, heritage communications, and interpretation.
Dr. Jeremy Rossiter
Professor. History, Classics, and Religious Studies.
After obtaining degrees in Classics (Edinburgh) and in Classical Archaeology (Alberta) I was hired into the University’s Classics Department in 1986. Almost at once I started working as a ceramics specialist (Roman pottery lamps) for several North American teams (Georgia, Michigan, Trinity) excavating at different sites in Carthage, Tunisia. Between 1993 and 2000 I directed excavations at two further sites at Carthage, both containing extra-mural Roman bath-houses. Between 2005 and 2007 I made several visits to Libya pursuing my research interests in Roman bath-houses and mosaics. As a member of AIEMA (Association international pour l’etude des mosaiques anciennes) I have regularly given papers on Roman mosaics at international conferences. In 2020 I organized a colloquium on the early history of archaeology at Carthage for the (since postponed) international RAC (Roman Archaeology Conference) conference at Split in Croatia.
Dr. Kisha Supernant
Associate Professor. Anthropology. Director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology.
Dr. Kisha Supernant is Métis, Director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology, and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. An award-winning teacher, researcher, and writer, her research interests include the relationship between cultural identities, landscapes, and the use of space, Métis archaeology, and heart-centered archaeological practice. Her research with Indigenous communities (including Métis and First Nations) in western Canada explores how archaeologists and communities can build collaborative research relationships and develop community-driven projects. She leads the Exploring Métis Identity Through Archaeology (EMITA), a collaborative research project which takes a relational approach to exploring the material past of Métis communities, including her own family, in western Canada. She is co-director of a new interdisciplinary research project on Métis kinscapes of Lac Ste Anne with a team of Indigenous scholars, as well as co-investigator on Cartographies of Deep Time, a recently funded SSHRC Insight Grant project that explores the complexities of history and different ways of knowing with Tsimshian communities in British Columbia. Recently, she has been increasingly engaged in using remote sensing technologies to locate and protect unmarked burials at the request of First Nations communities in Alberta and Saskatchewan. She has published in national and international journals, and two books that she co-edited were published in 2020 - Archaeologies of the Heart, with Springer Press, and Blurring Timescapes, Subverting Erasure: Remembering Ghosts on the Margins of History, with Berghahn Books.
Dr. Dagmar Wujastyk
Associate Professor. History, Classics, and Religious Studies.
I am an indologist specialized in the history and literature of classical Indian medicine (Ayurveda) and the Indian alchemical and iatrochemical traditions (rasaśāstra). My recent work has focused on the recipes of premodern rasaśāstra works, exploring the materials used as ingredients as well as the procedures applied for their transformation into the desired products to gain insight into Indian alchemists’ goals and their means to achieve them
Dr. Fran Pownall
Professor. History, Classics, and Religious Studies.
My scholarship examines in various ways how the historiographical tradition in Ancient Greece has been deployed either to legitimize or to subvert power and authority. I am particularly interested in the ruling ideology and self-fashioning of successive autocratic rulers in the Greek world (kings and tyrants from the Greek West through Philip II and Alexander of Macedon to the Hellenistic Successors). Because most of the relevant historical narratives are either fragmentary or date from much later (and incorporate the biases and concerns of their contemporary milieux), evidence from material culture (epigraphy, coinage, iconography, building programs, etc.) offers crucial complementary perspectives on their aims and agendas.
- Ms. Frannie Blondheim (University of Alberta Museums)
- Dr. Andre Costopoulos (Dean of Students and Professor of Anthropology)
- Dr. Ave Dersch, (Adjunct Professor of Anthropology)
- Dr. Lesley Harrington (Associate Professor of Anthropology)
- Dr. Robert Losey (Professor of Anthropology)
- Dr. Brooke Milne (Dean, Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research and Professor of Anthropology)
- Dr. Karyn Rabey (Assistant Professor of Anatomy, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry (FoMD); Adjunct Professor of Anthropology)
- Dr. Elizabeth Sawchuk (Adjunct Professor of Anthropology)
- Dr. Andrzej Weber (Professor of Anthropology)
- Nadia Kurd (University of Alberta Museums)
- Isabel Pifen Chueh (University of Alberta Museums),