Wake Forest University Anthropology Department

Join us in recognizing and celebrating the retirement and Emeritus status of our esteemed colleague, Dr. Steve Folmar Steve Folmar

Check out Dr. Clark's feature about Steve and the impact he has had on students and the department: https://college.wfu.edu/college-news/teacher-scholar-legacies/teacher-scholar-legacies-steve-folmar/

"As Steve Folmar transitions to Emeritus status, the Department of Anthropology reflects on a career defined not just by academic excellence, but by a radical commitment to service. To know Steve is to know a scholar who views the world not as a laboratory, but as a community of interconnected lives.

While Steve’s CV is decorated with NSF-funded research and leadership roles, his colleagues often point to his character during moments of quiet necessity as his true hallmark."

Thank you, Steve, for all that you've done for our students and the department! Feel free to share more memories and thoughts below, and we'll pass them along!

A language is more than words — it carries an entire worldview. If you know Dr. Bender, you've learned this in her classes!

In this fascinating new piece in The Conversation, Margaret Bender of Wake Forest University and Thomas N. Belt explore how the Cherokee Bible reflects Cherokee cultural values, identity, and resilience through language and translation. Bible

A language is more than words — it carries an entire worldview. If you know Dr. Bender, you've learned this in her classes!

In this fascinating new piece in The Conversation, Margaret Bender of Wake Forest University and Thomas N. Belt explore how the Cherokee Bible reflects Cherokee cultural values, identity, and resilience through language and translation.

The Cherokee Bible, one of the language’s first books, is a window between worldviews Cherokees across the US are working to revitalize their language.

Congratulations to our Anthro graduates. Swipe to see what they will be up to next year!

Spotlight on graduating anthropology senior Annelise Witcher, as featured in WFU's Old Gold and Black!

Inspired by the TV show Bones and drawn to the Wake Forest Lam Museum of Anthropology, Annelise found a passion for understanding people, culture, and cultural heritage preservation.
As a museum assistant at the Lam Museum, Annelise has helped modernize collection terminology and worked with 3D digitization technologies to preserve cultural heritage for future generations. After graduation, she hopes to continue museum work focused on digitizing and conserving collections.

We are proud to celebrate Annelise’s curiosity, compassion, and commitment to thoughtful, inclusive anthropology. Congratulations, Annelise! 🖤

CulturalHeritage

The Wake Forest Department of Anthropology is proud to announce that Brian Goldstone — the inaugural speaker in our new How to Be Human lecture series — has just been awarded the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his book There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, announced May 4, 2026.
Goldstone, a journalist and Duke-trained anthropologist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, and The New Republic, visited campus on April 1 to speak about his book — a deeply reported, ethnographic account of five Atlanta families navigating homelessness while working full-time in a rapidly gentrifying city — before joining a panel conversation with local expert Phyllis Caldwell-George, moderated by Dr. Sherri Lawson Clark.

How to Be Human brings distinguished visiting scholars to Wake Forest each year for public lectures, classroom visits, and conversations with students and faculty, and we couldn't be more thrilled that our very first event featured a now-Pulitzer Prize-winning author; stay tuned for announcements about our next speaker!

Reed Hastings recently argued that as AI takes over technical tasks, we'll see a "rotation back to the humanities," toward history, literature, and understanding how people think, feel, and relate to one another.
Sound familiar? That's anthropology.

Reed Hastings said STEM is going to be 'overdone' The cofounder of Netflix said in the age of AI, the focus will shift from STEM to the humanities.

Free cookies and lemonade tomorrow! All that and a wonderful talk at Dr. Taylor Callaway's Lunch and Learn at noon. We'll hope you'll join us then!

Recent book publication from our department!

Dr. Margaret Bender’s latest book, The New Voice of God, explores the powerful intersection of language, worldview, and translation in the history of the Cherokee Bible. This work highlights how linguistic and cultural exchange reshapes meaning in profound ways—an essential insight for anthropology today.

The New Voice of God
Language, Worldview, and the Cherokee Bible
by Margaret Bender and Thomas N. Belt

“For Christian European missionaries among the Cherokees at the turn of the eighteenth century, translating the Bible meant wrestling with the extreme structural differences between Cherokee and English. The New Voice of God reveals how these linguistic differences encoded basic predispositions and orientations toward the physical, spiritual, and social worlds—and how their translation in turn encodes the profound linguistic and cultural exchange manifested in the making of the Cherokee Bible. While the introduction of Christianity shaped Cherokee communicative practices and culture, the Cherokee language also reshaped the Bible to reflect a definitive Native worldview.”

📖 Learn more via the QR code
AnthroMatters of oklahomapress

Spring 2026 is off to an exciting start!

Dr. Gitzen has published two new articles exploring timely and innovative questions at the intersection of anthropology, science, and technology.

From rethinking research ethics in digital spaces to examining life “in the times of viruses,” these pieces highlight how anthropological perspectives help us make sense of rapidly changing worlds.

Check them out using the QR codes!