Anthropology and Sociology

Dr. Matthew Schoene, assistant professor of sociology, was recently named director of Albion College’s First-Year Seminars program, a core part of the William Atwell Brown, Jr., and Mary Brown Vacin First-Year Experience (FYE), beginning with the 2020-21 academic year. Even as he spent much of the prior two months shifting from on-campus to online instruction, Schoene is looking forward to this next challenge.

It looks pretty easy on television, but Charlie Downey, ’20, knows that getting information from human remains isn’t something you can do during the commercial break. “We examined thousands of fragments of bone,” says the anthropology and German major and member of the Prentiss M. Brown Honors Program, who spent the summer doing National Science Foundation-sponsored archaeology research at the University of South Alabama.

Just before Thanksgiving, Albion College sociology professor Matt Schoene’s European Integration class traveled to John Cabot University (JCU) in Rome, to present their research projects via an international conference with their JCU counterparts.

Scott Melzer, professor of sociology in Albion College’s Anthropology and Sociology Department, has just written a new book, Manhood Impossible, about the changing roles of fathers in today’s society. He offered a number of insights on the topic in a wide-ranging online interview with The Atlantic.

Albion College’s Anthropology Department has a new teaching tool thanks to the campus 3-D printing of a 300,000-year-old Homo nadeli skull that may well change what we know about the history of the species on our planet

Albion College anthropology professor Alli Harnish has a question. And she really wants an answer. “I moved here in 2013 and I saw all these signs around the state with the name Cass,” she said. And then she began to list them off in rapid succession.