Please send entries (2-3 sentences long) and periodic updates to Dr. Wagner. 

Monique S. Balas (1997)    Monique is now a freelance writer for “The Sunday Oregonian” working on a weekly travel column called “Travel Savvy.” She received a Master’s degree in Print Journalism from Northwestern University, and says that her Cultural Anthropology skills proved vital to her reporting methods, especially Ethnographic Methods, which “was a great predecessor to a career in journalism.” (Posted Spring 2006)

James Bielo (2001)    Congratulations to James who successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation in December 2006 in the Doctoral program at Michigan State University. His dissertation examines the practice of small group Bible study among American Protestants.  His fieldwork consisted of studies in and around Lansing, Michigan with six Protestant congregations. His goal was to take a discourse-centered approach to an analysis of group Bible study in American Protestant religious practice. James will be adjunct teaching at Grand Valley state University in Michigan and he will also be teaching a course at MSU on “Language and Culture” in Summer 2007.  He says, “I owe much of my success and development as an ethnographer, an Anthropologist, and a person to my Radford University Anthropology training.” (Posted Winter 2006-7)

Jerusha Brooks (1997)   Jerusha is currently Director of Human Resources for The Keys of Carolina, a subsidiary of Universal Health Services. Jerusha’s position includes staff recruitment, hiring, training, coordinating benefits, interpreting company policies, and assisting employees on a daily basis. Her company provides residential services for at-risk youth. She works with a diverse group of people and says that Cultural Anthropology “helped to prepare me for working with people from other cultures and different walks of life. Being patient and respectful of people who are different from me and have different ideas based on where and how they were brought up is something that I feel has helped to me to exceed in my career.”  (Posted Spring 2008)

Lindsay Coada (2003)    Lindsay is currently a 7^th grade history and language arts teacher. She says that in her teaching, she uses anthropology a lot when teaching her students about criminal justice (civics), especially when they reach the judicial branch unit. She says her degree in Anthropology enabled her to bring a new side to the information she presents to her students. (Posted Spring 2006)

Nicole Danhauser (2003)    Nicole is currently working for the National Certification Commission for Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, a company which certifies people to become practitioners of Acupuncture, Oriental Medicine, Chinese Herbology, and Asian Bodywork Therapy. Within this company, Nicole helps the eligibility department with their flow of documents sent by applicants. Previously, she worked at Fiber Technology Construction, Inc, a subcontractor of Verizon working on a multi-billion dollar cable project in the Northern Virginia region. Nicole says she has not settled on a career yet, but she is looking forward to going to graduate school to continue her education. (Posted Spring 2006)

Angela Dautartas (2005) is currently a graduate student in Physical Anthropology at the University of Tennessee,  Knoxville.  In Summer 2005, before heading to graduate school, she played a major role in mapping the Saltville battlefields.  Read all about it by clicking here.  (Posted Spring 2006)

Christine England (2004)    Christine is currently working at S&ME, a Richmond engineering firm with a new Cultural Resources Management (CRM) division, after working for the Louis Berger Group as an Archaeology field technician since graduation. While working for the Louis Berger Group, she completed field work in Danville and Williamsburg, Virginia, South Carolina, New Jersey, Vermont, and Indiana. One of her projects was in Brooklyn, recovering human remains from Ground Zero. She is one of the first archaeology hires for S&ME, and hopes to have an impact on the direction the CRM division takes. To see further information on her field work in Williamsburg on the Chickahominy River, click the attached link:  Chickahominy River . (Posted Spring 2008)

Jennifer Fanson (1999)    Jennifer is currently a freelance writer in Los Angeles, where she writes children’s literature for the science and social science curriculums of grades K-12, in addition to developing state and federal grants for non-profit organizations. Jennifer received her Master’s in Anthropology from California State University, Fullerton, where she completed her thesis on education outreach and the Gabrielino Native American culture. She has also participated in field work in both Southern California and Belize, and has hopes of completing and publishing her first children’s book in 2006. (Posted Spring 2006)

Kristen Hedrick (1997)    Kristen is currently employed as a Special Education Teacher at Eastern Montgomery High School. In 2005, she earned a Master of Science in Special Education from RU, and is currently completing a Master of Science in Education, with a Library Media concentration, and an additional endorsement in Reading. She says, “Perhaps the greatest lesson I learned through the [Anthropology] program is to seek an authentic, unbiased, and empathetic understanding of other people. Instead of judging others by my own values and experiences, I should seek to understand the "internal cultural contexts" that other people carry with them.” (Posted Spring 2006)

Barbara Jones (1995)  Barbara is pictured here with an aboriginal woman from the Australian outback. In 2000, she earned a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers University, and is currently an Assistant Professor at Brookdale Community College in Lincroft, NJ. She is a tenured faculty member, teaches a wide range of Anthropology courses, and has been developing opportunities for students in experiential anthropology, short-term study abroad programs, and a summer field experience in archaeology. Each year, she takes students to O’ahu in Hawaii to study Hawaiian, Polynesian, and Asian cultures to help teach students basic ethnographic methods. Her current research involves collecting oral histories from commercial fishermen who work New Jersey's bays and estuaries. These fishermen are facing tremendous pressure from developers for their ports and home communities, as well as pressure from resource depletion. She is in the process of documenting their way of life by collecting oral histories. Posted Spring 2006)

David M. Jones (2004)    David is currently enrolled at East Tennessee State University in the Master of Arts Teaching Program. He is working towards his K-6 licensure in teaching. He also works at Texas Roadhouse as a Servers Assistant. He says that all of the courses he took through the Anthropology program were extremely beneficial to his hew academic setting, and that the Anthropology professors all inspired him to pursue the goal of becoming a teacher. (Posted Spring 2006)

Jean Kappes  (1994)    Jean currently lives in Newington, CT with her husband and two sons, where she is completing her master’s degree in counseling and interning at a college counseling center.  She says she uses her training in Anthropology quite frequently both in her studies and in life, and that it has provided her with a perspective on how she lives in the world and how others choose to live. She says, “I think it was incredibly beneficial. In some respects I consider counseling similar to anthropology but with a narrower scope and a different expected outcome. In counseling I hope to help someone live in a better way, instead of in anthropology where the most important aspect is observation and description.” (Posted Spring 2008)

Luke Eric Lassiter (1990)   Eric joined Marshall University’s Graduate College as Professor of Humanities and Anthropology and Director of the Graduate Humanities Program.  Before coming to Marshall, he was an associate professor of anthropology at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. After graduating from RU, he went on to earn his Ph.D in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1995. He has authored or co-authored several books, including The Power of Kiowa Song (1998), Invitation to Anthropology (2002), and The Other Side of Middletown (2004).  His most recent work, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography (2005), elaborates strategies for collaborative research between and among academics and local communities.  He received the 2005 Margaret Mead Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and American Anthropological Association (see http://www.sfaa.net/mead/lassiter.html).  (Posted Spring 2006)

Susan Lilly (1991, 1996)    Susan is currently the Town Naturalist in Herndon, Virginia, in addition to being an Adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College, teaching Outdoor Education and Interpretive Services. She is working to develop a Nature Center for the park and implementing park improvements including a handicapped trail, picnic shelters, & restrooms. She also runs a "Nature Discovery Camp" that has won "Best Nature Program" for the Virginia Recreation & Parks Society for the second year in a row, and an award for "Best Conservation Program."  She says that her Anthropology skills have come in handy in communicating with and reaching out to the diverse population in Herndon, where there is a large population of people from India. She enjoys helping people understand the folk lore and cultural myths that surround wildlife, like snakes and other reptiles, so that they can better understand wildlife and care for it.  Susan has also been accepted by the National Museum of the American Indian to serve as an interpreter. (Updated Fall 2006)

Daliah G. Macon (1994)    Daliah is currently the Administrative Coordinator for Government Affairs and General Counsel at Southwest Airlines. She says that the skills she gained from earning her Anthropology degree at Radford University have helped her have positive relationships with customers, internal and external clients, as well as Congressional Offices. (Posted Spring 2006)

Audrey L. Meehan (2004)    Audrey is working at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command Central Identification Laboratory in Hickam AFB, Hawaii. She is the DNA coordinator, working as an ORISE (Oak Ridge Institute of Science and Education) research fellow. Audrey recently applied to the University of Hawaii Masters Program in Physical Anthropology. Also, her application to the American Association of Forensic Scientists was recently accepted. She notes that the training she received at RU was “invaluable. My training at RU has opened many doors and provided me with a rewarding future.” (Posted Spring 2006)

Maureen Meyers (1997)     Maureen is currently in the second year of a Ph.D. program in Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. After graduating from Radford, she earned a Master's degree in Anthropology from the University of Georgia. This past summer she was awarded a Smithsonian Fellowship to reanalyze ceramics from C.G. Holland's Southwest Virginia 1961 survey, and is currently analyzing that data. She is active in professional organizations, having given over 25 papers at local, regional and national archaeology conferences, and currently serves as Executive Officer I for the Southeastern Archaeological Conference and on the Society for American Archaeology's National Historic Landmarks committee.  (Posted Spring 2006)

Kenesha Moseley Beheler (2006)     Kenesha is working for Mount Vernon News in their special projects department doing video stories for their web site. She is excited about her job and says "I am doing Applied Anthropology, I am doing basically ethnographic film making just like what we did in 2005 and 2006 in the RU Anthropology program, except the films I make are two minutes long.  And yet, this is allowing me to take topics of human interest and community involvement to do stories on them and put them into videos."  You can check out some of Kenesha's work on the web at http://www.mountvernonnews.com.  (Posted Fall 2007)

Adam Sowder (2002)    Adam has been a Realtor/Team Manager for the Sowder Brother’s Real Estate Team, LLC at ERA Oakcrest Realty, Inc, for over three years in Winchester, Virginia. Recently, Adam applied to the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. in hopes of earning a Master of Divinity Degree to transfer his occupation to the United Methodist Church. He says, “Anthropology fits perfectly in the sales and corporate community since we are dealing with people’s needs, wants, and items of importance.” (Posted Spring 2006)  

Jennifer Street (2003)    Jennifer works as an occupational therapist on a rehab floor. In addition, she is currently working on her Master’s degree in Forensic Science. She says that her anthropology degree really helps make her more aware and accepting of other cultures. Her degree also comes into play in her current graduate work when she needs writing, critical thinking, and research skills. She says “My training is very beneficial in my graduate degree experience and future work. I hope to work for the government or state in helping solve crimes and my anthropology classes set up the background for all this.” (Posted Spring 2006)  

Barbara Talbert (1999)    Barbara is currently working as a Special Education Homebound teacher with Washington County, TN schools. She says that she uses her Anthropology skills all the time when dealing with a culturally diverse student body and used ethnographic skills in a generational poverty situation while teaching. “I think my Anthropology training was priceless… it has given me a leg up over my colleagues because I already knew what to look for whenever I encountered a kid from a different culture.” (Posted Spring 2006)

Britney Walton (2002)    Britney works as the Field Director of Training and Education for the American Lung Association, where she oversees the training and implementation of thirty-five grant programs. Following her graduation from Radford University, Britney traveled to West Africa to work with the Peace Corps. She says, “No doubt, my interest was heightened due to my cross-cultural studies in RU’s Anthropology department.” (Posted Spring 2006)

Peg Wimmer (2002)    Peg successfully defended her Master's thesis in February 2007 in the Sociology Program at Virginia Tech. Her thesis examined the tenants of professionalism in medical practice among rural physicians in Southwestern Virginia. With the completion of her Master's degree was a Certification in Gerontology awarded from the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech. This multidisciplinary program focuses on both the normal and problematic aspects of aging. As Peg says, "The knowledge and insight provided by this certification program was especially helpful in dealing with day-to-day life as a member of the Sandwich Generation." Peg taught two introductory courses at RU in the Spring of 2007 as an adjunct professor in Sociology. She is currently working as a full-time Instructor of Sociology at Ferrum College and following her passion for research by working as an field ethnographer in marketing research for SmartRevenue.Com. She says “The program at RU prepared me well for the demands of graduate school as well as giving me a working knowledge of research methods that so many of my cohort members lacked.” (Updated Spring 2008)