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SAR Researchers

The School for Advanced Research (SAR) is home to several administrative faculty, research associates, and senior scholars who are actively engaged in research and writing in the social sciences, humanities, and Native arts.

Current Researchers

Tom Dillehay
Senior Scholar, 2019-Present

Tom Dillehay is an archaeologist and anthropologist whose work has taken him to Peru, Chile, Argentina and other South American countries as well as across the United States. His main interests are migration, the long-term transformative processes leading to political and economic change, and the interdisciplinary and historical methodologies designed to study those processes.
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Miriam Kolar
Staff Scholar, 2022–Present

Miriam Kolar’s cultural acoustics research explores human-sonic interrelationships across time and geography, integrating acoustical and auditory perceptual science in prehistoric archaeology. Since 2008, Dr. Kolar has led archaeoacoustics and music archaeology research at the UNESCO World Heritage Centre of Chavín de Huántar, Peru, with a second Andean project about Inca communication. In 2021, she initiated acoustics research in Upper Paleolithic sites including Chauvet and Marsoulas caves (France).                                             Read more >

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Carol MacLennan
Senior Scholar, 2018–Present

Carol MacLennan is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research is on policy and industry in the United States. She was an SAR Ethel J. Westfeldt Bunting Fellow in 2014 and is a Professor of Anthropology Emerita and Research Professor at Michigan Technological University (MTU) where she taught anthropology and environmental policy.
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Paul Ryer
Staff Scholar, 2016–Present

Dr. Paul Ryer received his PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago. Professor Ryer has conducted long-term research in Cuba–where he was affiliated with the University of Havana–and its diasporas. Before coming to SAR, he taught at both Williams College, Mount Holyoke College, and UC – Riverside.
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Wenda R. Trevathan
Senior Scholar, 2021–Present

Dr. Wenda R. Trevathan is a biological anthropologist whose research focuses on the evolutionary and biocultural factors underlying human reproduction including childbirth, maternal behavior, sexuality, and menopause.
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Deborah Winslow
Senior Scholar, 2019 – Present

Deborah Winslow is a cultural anthropologist who studies the emergence of social and economic systems over time and space. Her field research has been  conducted primarily in rural Sri Lanka, although she also has done research in India (1966-67, 1989) and Guatemala (1969). She was an SAR National Endowment for the Humanities Resident Scholar in 1984-85 and is Professor of Anthropology Emerita at the University of New Hampshire.
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Former Senior Scholars

Linda S. Cordell
Senior Scholar, 2006–2013

Linda S. Cordell (1943–2013) was an archaeologist whose primary research was in the U.S. Southwest with an emphasis on the 14th- and 15th-century northern and central Rio Grande Valley Ancestral Pueblo peoples.
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Dean Falk
Senior Scholar, 2010–2021

Dean Falk is a biological anthropologist who studies the evolution of the brain and cognition. Current writing projects focus on the endocast of an australopithecine infant, the evolution of the neurological substrates of conscience, and Charles Darwin’s views about human evolution.
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Steven Feld
Senior Scholar, 2016–2020

Steven Feld is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist, filmmaker, and sound artist. His anthropology of sound research ranges from interspecies rainforest acoustic ecology in Papua New Guinea, to the pastoral history of village bells in Southern Europe, to the diasporic intimacy of jazz in West African urban modernity. His current Voices of the Rainforest project at SAR includes a digital archive, book, feature documentary film, and sound art installation to bring together 35 years of collaborative research with the Bosavi community in Papua New Guinea.
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George J. Gumerman
Senior Scholar, 2005–2016

Senior Scholar George J. Gumerman has been a leader in major theoretical advances in his field since the 1960s. He is at the forefront of using computer modeling to simulate the cultural evolution of the prehistoric Southwest.
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N. Scott Momaday
Senior Scholar, 2006–2010

Scott Momaday is a poet, a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist, a playwright, a painter, a storyteller, and a professor of English and American literature. He is a Native American (Kiowa), and among his chief interests are Native American art and oral tradition.
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Douglas W. Schwartz
Senior Scholar, 2000–2016

A towering figure in the history of SAR and American archaeology, Douglas W. Schwartz died on June 29 in Santa Fe. He was one month shy of his eighty-seventh birthday. Doug Schwartz served as president of the School for Advanced Research (formerly the School of American Research) between 1967 and 2001. He is credited with transforming SAR from a venerable but unfocused institution into one of the nation’s most important research centers in anthropology, archaeology, and Native American arts and cultures.
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David E. Stuart
Senior Scholar, 2013–2019

Dr. Stuart is an internationally recognized anthropologist whose most cited books are Prehistoric New Mexico, Anasazi America, The Guaymas Chronicles, and the recently released Ancient People of the Pajarito Plateau. He earned his PhD in anthropology from the University of New Mexico and he served many years at UNM as associate provost for academic affairs.
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Former Staff Scholars

Nancy Owen Lewis
Scholar-in-Residence, 2011–2022

Dr. Nancy Owen Lewis received her PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Massachusetts and has taught anthropology at the University of Alabama and the University of Arkansas. Her current research focuses on the Dogs for Defense program run by the U.S. Army during WWII
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Nicole Taylor
Staff Scholar, 2011–2016

Dr. Taylor, former Director of Scholar Programs at SAR, holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Arizona. Her research explores the interplay between gender, identity, and everyday discourse among youth vis-à-vis sociocultural factors related to weight. Read more >