Faculty

Active Faculty

Marta Alfonso-Durruty

Jessica Falcone
Cultural anthropologist Dr. Falcone explores the fluid pathways between South Asian cultures and the rest of the world ...

Brad Logan
When it comes to archaeology, Brad is strictly on the level. A native Kansan, he enjoys exploring the prehistory of the central Plains. He also loves to teach students field and lab methods and tells them they can be applied anywhere, as he did here (many moons ago) in southwestern France.

Harald E.L. Prins
Born in the Netherlands, this prof has the foreign accent and genes to prove it. His Batavian forefathers were seafarers since the 1500s, and probably much earlier. He still speaks and sometimes dresses like his stout ancestors across the ocean.

Lauren W. Ritterbush
Sifting the soil of mother earth Dr. Ritterbush searches for broken pottery, stone tools, and treasures unknown (not dinosaurs) in order to understand the human past.

Elizabeth Spreng
As a linguistic anthropologist, Prof. Spreng has her way with words.

Michael Wesch
As a cultural anthropologist, Prof Wesch is a participant observer in New Guinea and New Media. With his laptop he turns into a magic trickster and practices cyber sorcery.....

Adjunct and Emeritus Faculty

Janet Benson

A field ethnographer who has worked in many settings, Dr.Janet Benson's first love is India. After learning to wear a sari and speak Telugu, she became interested in the "New Immigration" to the U.S. and as part of a Ford Foundation ethnography project, along with some fifty researchers nationally, went out to look for America. Favorite quote: "Worlds within worlds/ Each hath one, and is one." (John Donne)

Michael Finnegan
Ernest Hemingway looked a bit like Dr. Finnegan, the world-renowned forensic anthropologist a.k.a. as Dr. Bones, who analyzed the remains of bandit Jesse James.

Bunny McBride

Bunny McBride discovered cultural anthropology while traveling to China, Gambia, Morocco, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Seychelles, and many other distant places in the world. Originally trained as a painter and sculptor, she became intrigued by all that fascinating stuff so far abroad. Her favorite place in the world is the sandstone cliffs in the desert of Mali where the Dogon live. Famous for their masks, they honored her by performing the Dogon Rabbit dance....

Patricia O'Brien

Better known as "Pat," this daughter of an Irish vaudevillian with a dance school in Chicago began her career as a telephone operator. Bored stiff, she dreamed about Annie Oakley and escaped from Windy City to the Great Plains. Instead of a gun and bullet, she chose pen and trowel as her weapons of choice. Now an emerita professor, Dr. O'Brien earned an international reputation as an archaeologist specialized on the Pawnee......

Harriet Joseph Ottenheimer

Before embarking on an academic career in linguistic anthropology, Harriet Joseph sang and played in New York cafes and clubs. Bored by cantos, canticles, and cantatas, she discovered bliss in Blues. Inspired by vaudeville singer Esther Bigeou, she moved to New Orleans and became friends with Cousin Joe. Her coffeehouse was raided and she ran off to Kansas… How she found time to get a doctorate, a husband, two sons, and several sailing championships is a mystery to those who don’t know what drives emirita prof Harriet J. Ottenheimer...

Martin Ottenheimer

As successor of legendary anthropologist Ibn Battuta, emeritus professor Martin Ottenheimer brings international fame to our program. An avid sea sailor, this cultural anthropologist often returns to the Comoros Islands in the Indian Ocean where he enjoys great respect as Omar Abudavi....

Robert B. Taylor

Robert Bartley Taylor (1926- ) became the first anthropologist at Kansas State University in 1957, fresh from a year of doctoral fieldwork among Zapotec Indians in the Oaxaca valley, Mexico. Named after his grandfather, a Presbyterian minister in California and raised in a prominent wheat- and livestock farming family in Umatilla, Oregon, Taylor originally planned to become a protestant missionary and agricultural development specialist. Soon after graduating in 1951, and interested in missionary anthropology, he began teaching as an instructor at Wheaton College. Two years later, in 1953, he became the founding editor of Practical Anthropology, a journal on applications of anthropology in Christian thought and practice. Next, he became a doctoral student at the University of Oregon. Based on his fieldwork, he wrote his thesis Teotitlán de Valle: A Typical Mesoamerican Community, which he successfully defended in 1960. In 1969, Taylor published an influential introductory textbook titled Cultural Ways: A Compact Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Boston: Allyn & Bacon), which went through several editions, including an Italian translation Elementi di antropologia culturale (Bologna: Il Mulino '72). In 1972, he published an extended version of this introductory text, simply titled Introduction to Cultural Anthropology (Allyn & Bacon). In addition to several articles in a variety of journals, he also published another book, titled Indians of Middle America; An Introduction to the Ethnology of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean (Lifeway Press '89). Recognized with a William L. Stamey Award in 1990, Dr. Taylor retired in 1990, and moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, with his wifeFloris. Among his legacies is that he left behind a small but flourishing program that had grown from one to six full-time faculty, covering each of the four-fields.