Departmental Self Review - UCLA Academic Senate

• Maureen Mahon: The cultural politics of race in the United States.• C. Jason Throop: The cultural expression of pain and virtue in Yap, Micronesia.Our faculty has published in widely-read and prestigious journals both within the disciplineand in the broader scientific community. For example, recent publications by departmentalfaculty have appeared in American Anthropologist, American Antiquity, American EthnologistAmerican Journal ofPhysical Anthropology, Current Anthropology, PNAS, Nature, and Science. Thisresearch has also attracted national and international media attention; faculty projects havebeen featured in US News and World Report, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, The New YorkTimes and CBS News, among other venues.During the current review period, faculty have secured more than $18 million in extramuralfunding for research (see appendix). The Sloan Center on the Everyday Lives of Familiesaccounts for $12.2 million of this total. Many of our faculty also have been recognized throughprestigious awards and honors: We have two MacArthur Fellows (Ochs, Ortner); several havereceived the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (Boyd, Donnan, Duranti, Ochs, Ortner); andseveral are members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Donnan, Edgerton, Ochs,Ortner, Stanish). The quality of our teaching has also been recognized through distinguishedteaching awards (Duranti, Edgerton, Hale, Hammond, Hollan).The faculty as a whole has also invested in the development of interest groups that capture themajor intellectual threads of the department. Each of these interest groups regularly meet andprovide fora for the presentation of ongoing research by faculty, students and visiting scholars(see below).We also recognize that we face some serious challenges over the corning years. Of foremostconcern is the top-heavy age structure of the faculty and the impact that the anticipated wave ofretirements will have on the viability of the program. We have been proactive in developingstrategic plans for future hires that will bring more junior faculty to the program and expandthe intellectual and research strengths of the department.4.1. Faculty FTE and Department CompositionSince the last review, the department lost ladder faculty due to retirement (Johnson),recruitment by other institutions (Leventhal, Morgan, Plummer, Simons, Vigil), and death(Hill), but gained a number of new faculty at the junior and senior levels: Jeff Brantingham,Gregson Schachner and Monica Smith (archaeology), Clark Barrett and Dan Fessler (biological),H. Samy Alirn (linguistic), Akhil Gupta, Maureen Mahon, Sherry Ortner, Susan Slyomovics, andJason Throop (sociocultural). In addition, Jeanne Arnold's status changed from Professor in23