SAR News 
SAR Welcomes New Board Directors
The School for Advanced Research (SAR) is pleased to welcome four new members and two returning members to its board of directors, as well as one new Advisory Board member. These members bring a vast array of experience in many areas, including anthropology, sociology, leadership, and development.
The SAR Humanities Festival Returns
The School for Advanced Research (SAR) presents the 2024 SAR Humanities Festival: Food for Thought: lectures, discussions, film, and field trips investigating ancient and modern food systems, sustainability, eating and food ethics, and the lives of farmers, ranchers,...
Visit SAR Artist Fellows at the 2024 Santa Fe Indian Market
Billed the world’s largest and most prestigious Native arts show, the Santa Fe Indian Market returns this weekend in its 102nd year. Over twenty former School for Advanced Research (SAR) Artist Fellows will have booths on or around the Santa Fe Plaza at the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA)’s 2024 Santa Fe Indian Market on August 17 and 18, 2024.
A Conversation with Kevin Aspaas: The Story of a Modern Diné Weaver
Born and raised in Santa Fe for the first nine years of his life, Kevin’s arrival was a homecoming of sorts. Before he was born, his mother moved here with some of his siblings so one of his sisters could attend the School for the Deaf. She raised her children and wove during the school year, while his father stayed behind in Shiprock to work for the power plant – an arrangement that echoed so many Diné (Navajo) households of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They returned home to Shiprock and Jeddito, where Kevin’s mother is from, for the summers.
Grounded in Clay Leaves New York, Headed for Houston
After a year of stellar reviews and visitors from all over the world, IARC staff recently traveled to New York to deinstall the second venues of Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vilcek Foundation.
SAR Scholar Alberto Wilson Interweaves the Industrial Political Economy and the Fighting Spirit of the Working Class in Ciudad Juárez/El Paso
Smack in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert an urban landscape emerges. The Rio Grande, or Río Bravo to those in Mexico, trickles through, designating their two countries: to the north El Paso, Texas, and to the south, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. They have separate names; however, it is impossible to consider one without the other.
What Is the School for Advanced Research?
Since being named president of SAR, I’ve had many opportunities to describe the institution I’ll be leading to friends, colleagues, and others curious about what I’m doing next. I’ve also received numerous communications from SAR members, alumni, and supporters with...
The Year the Stars Fell
Philip Deloria, 2023–2024 Katrin H. Lamon Fellow, is writing a new book that looks at American epistemology through shared experiences of the extraordinary Leonid meteor storm of November 1833—which may have generated as many as thirty meteors per second. “This is a perfect moment in America to imagine a continental history of shared experience among many peoples.”
Farewell Statement by President Michael F. Brown
Several years ago, I alerted our board of directors of my intention to retire after ten years as SAR’s twelfth president. I am now on the cusp of that milestone. Leading SAR has been a privilege and the pinnacle of my career as an anthropologist and educator. One thing I’ve learned over a long career, however, is that institutions need new leadership at regular intervals to meet the challenges of a changing world. That’s why I chose to step down now.
SAR Gala Celebrates the Past to Support the Future
Honoring both fifty years of Resident Scholar Fellows and ten years of Michael F. Brown’s presidency at the School for Advanced Research (SAR), 105 of SAR’s esteemed supporters, board members, and friends gathered together in the newly named Michael F. Brown Plaza for a celebratory evening of bidding, buying, dining, and mingling on the evening of June 8, 2024.
2023-2024 SAR Mellon Fellow Derek Xavier Garcia Engages with the Rio Grande Valley of Texas Through the Lens of Colegio Jacinto Treviño: the First Mexican-American Institute of Higher Learning
Derek Xavier Garcia’s work is living and active. Not only does he interview members of the community for his dissertation and future book, he engages with them, bringing history to life in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
Tiya Miles and Ned Blackhawk Remember Residencies and Impact on Each Other
So far, two SAR Resident Scholar Fellows have won the National Book Award: Tiya Miles in 2021 for her book All that She Carried: the Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake and Ned Blackhawk in 2023 for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Recently, they took a moment from their very busy schedules to share a little about their residency experiences at SAR, how they impacted their lives, and also a few words about how they influenced each other.
Santa Clara Sibling Scholars Studied the Transformation of a Gendered Pueblo World
In 1996, the Resident Scholar Program at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) did something it had not done before and hasn’t since. Three sibling scholars shared the Katrin H. Lamon fellowship: Rina Swentzell, Tessie Naranjo, and Tito Naranjo from Santa Clara Pueblo.
Tim A. Kohler, Global Pattern Thinking in Archaeology
1986-87 Weatherhead Fellows, Timothy A. Kohler and Carla M. Sinopoli. Photo courtesy of the School for Advanced Research. In celebration of fifty years of resident scholars at SAR, we are publishing a series of posts about the program and scholars over the years....
Weaving Worlds with Words – the Collaborative Life of Dennis and Barbara Tedlock
There’s one couple who essentially “book-end” the scholars in that group from 1973 and to the 2000s: Barbara and Dennis Tedlock. They were poet scholars. Both taught poetry in addition to anthropology. Both wrote their own poetry and participated in literary readings. Their mission was to “expand and alter the ways in which anthropologists conduct and communicate their work,” expressed in just that way in the preface to the first issue of the American Anthropologist, which they edited as a husband and wife team from 1994-1998.
School for Advanced Research Awards Residential Fellowships to Three Native Artists
Santa Fe, New Mexico—The School for Advanced Research (SAR) is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024–2025 Native Artist Fellowships: Kevin Aspaas (Navajo), Lynda Teller Pete (Navajo), and Sheridan MacKnight (White Earth Chippewa, Hunkpapa Lakota). Each year...
The First Three Resident Scholar Fellows at SAR
The first three Weatherhead resident scholar fellows on the new campus of the School of American Research in 1974. Left to right: Edwin L. Wade (1973-5), Joann W. Kealiinohomoku (1974-5), Earl Wesley Jernigan (1974-6). Photo courtesy of the School for Advanced...
SAR Board of Directors Announces Appointment of Morris W. Foster as Next SAR President
When Michael F. Brown accepted the role as president for the School for Advanced Research in 2014, he committed to leading the institution for ten years. True to his word, last fall Dr. Brown announced his retirement effective July 2024, ending a tenure of exceptional...
Dream to Reality: Beginnings of the Resident Scholar Program at SAR
Finding and fostering a place for scholars to live, study, and write in community was the dream of Douglas Schwartz. When he visited the School of American Research (SAR) in the fall of 1966 as “program consultant,” Schwartz was so sure he would remain in his tenured anthropology position at the University of Kentucky…
Three SAR Alumni in the National News
Both Ned Blackhawk (Katrin Lamon Fellow, 1996-1997; SAR Board of Directors 2017-2023) and Tiya Miles (SAR Fellow, 2007-2008) have been named 2024 Guggenheim Fellows. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards these fellowships annually to “exceptional individuals in pursuit of scholarship in any field of knowledge and creation in any art form, under the freest possible conditions.”
SAR Welcomes New Board Directors
Over the past six months, the School for Advanced Research (SAR) Board of Directors appointed eight new Board and Advisory Board members. They bring experience in scholarship, language, marketing, development, social change programs, art history, writing and...
School for Advanced Research Awards the 2024 J. I. Staley Prize to T. M. Luhrmann for “How God Becomes Real”
Top Prize in Scholarship and Writing in Anthropology Awarded for Book That “Shows How Faith Is ‘Kindled’, or Intentionally Brought into Being” Santa Fe, New Mexico—The School for Advanced Research is pleased to announce the recipient of the 2024 J. I. Staley Prize:...
N. Scott Momaday, 1934–2024
Navarre Scott Momaday, the nation's most celebrated Native American writer, died at his home in Santa Fe on January 24. He was 89. Momaday, a member of the Kiowa Tribe, is remembered at SAR for his long service to this institution: as a Katrin Lamon Resident Scholar,...
SAR Receives $900,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
Image: Collections review with the Pueblo of Acoma at the Indian Arts Research Center The School for Advanced Research (SAR) is honored to announce that it has been awarded a grant in the amount of $900,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The...
2024: A Look Ahead
New Year's festivities inevitably include reviews of the year that's winding down. For SAR's first blog post of 2024, I prefer to pivot toward the near future. Although some details have yet to fall into place, I’m pleased to identify highlights of our programming for...
Grounded in Clay Reception at The Met, New York
Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery Reception at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, October 10, 2023. All photos courtesy of The Met. Credit: Paula Lobo.New Mexico proud! Members of the Pueblo Pottery Collective and their families, as well as SAR staff and...
SAR Produces Podcasts
The School for Advanced Research is now producing podcasts starting with stories from Grounded in Clay curators. The Grounded in Clay Podcast has launched on the PodBean platform. Episodes, which are free to stream or download, are available there and on Apple...
Inaugural Humanities Festival Raises a New Profile for SAR
The Santa Fe New Mexican noted SAR’s “broader and more vigorous approach” to programming when SAR launched its new Humanities Festival in September. The Humanities Festival: American Identities was a micro-festival illuminating diverse American experiences through lectures, music, film, and discussion. A special SAR hallmark of these events was the moderated community conversations hosted by SAR President Michael F. Brown.
Saluting Kindness in the World
About eighteen minutes outside of Gallup on the first day of SAR’s recent field trip to Canyon de Chelly, our luxury coach bus glided gracefully to the shoulder of Highway 264 and then proceeded to power down. None of the attempted ministrations could coax it back to life. The diagnosis of a faulty fuse didn’t come until later, but it was clear the vehicle was going nowhere.
SAR Alumna Tiya Miles Interviewed for the New York Times Book Review
An interview of Tiya Miles (History, Harvard), an SAR resident scholar in 2007-2008, appeared in the New York Times Book Review's "By the Book" section on October 15. In the interview, Miles describes her childhood passion for reading: "Reading became my escape and...