Graduate Students

Graduate Student

Taylor Carr-Howard
Areas of Interest:

Art and archaeology of the Roman provinces, archaeological photographs, cultural heritage, classical reception

Taylor Carr-Howard studies Roman provincial art and archaeology through the lens of its reception. In particular, she is interested in the role photography plays in shaping perceptions of the classical past. Taylor received her BA in art history from Scripps College in 2017 and her MA in...
Alex Casteel
Areas of Interest:
  • Early medieval Iceland and the Iron and Viking Ages in northern Europe/Scandinavia
  • Posthumanist and new materialist archaeological theory
  • Material ecocriticism and embodiment
  • Old Norse language, mythology, and Norse architecture
  • Digital humanities and GIS
Alex Casteel (he/him/his) is a PhD student at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Although Alex's earliest archaeological fieldwork was in South America, he examined possible Viking-Age artefacts at a re-used broch in Orkney for his Bachelor's thesis after an interest in the synergy of...
Edward Cleofe
Areas of Interest:

Exploring the possibilities of comparative research in the archipelago of the Spanish East Indies and the “vertical archipelago” of the Viceroyalty of Peru during the early modern period.

Edward Cleofe was born and raised in Southern California. He earned a BA in anthropology from Brown University in 2015. From 2015 to 2019, he worked for youth-serving nonprofits in Seattle, Washington. Edward is interested in exploring the archaeology of the Philippines, with a focus on ritual and...
Manuel Elizalde
Yunong Gu
Areas of Interest:

Archaeology of Bronze Age China, Zooarchaeology; Economic history; Settlement Archaeology

Yunong Gu is a native of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. He received his B.A. and M.A. in archaeology from the Department of Archaeology and Museology at Peking University. When he was in Peking University, he excavated several sites of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, such as Pingliangtai,...
Earl Hernandez
Areas of Interest:

Spanish colonialism during the early modern period

Earl John Cedo Hernandez is an anthropological archaeologist from Bicol, Philippines. He received his BA in Political Science from the Ateneo de Naga University in 2015 and MA in Anthropology from the University of the Philippines - Diliman in 2022. As a Bikolano anthropologist he is broadly...
Ariadin Jones
Areas of Interest:

Late Neolithic - Early Bronze Age China

Ariadin Jones’ current research trajectory began as an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia (UBC), where she majored in Asian Area Studies and minored in Archaeology, with an additional concentration in bioarchaeology. Looking to combine these interests, she attended the UCLA...
Katrina Kuxhausen
Areas of Interest:

Cultural heritage, digital archaeology, landscape, architecture, reuse, memory, and gender studies within ancient Greece and Rome

Katrina Kuxhausen-DeRose is pursuing a PhD in Archaeology at UCLA, with a focus in Classical Archaeology. Her research interests include cultural heritage, digital archaeology, landscape, architecture, reuse, memory, and gender studies within ancient Greece and Rome. She began researching this...
Lucha Martínez de Luna
Areas of Interest:

Mesoamerican interregional trade networks, merchants, feasting, sociopolitical organization in complex societies, and the Zoque civilization.

Lucha Martínez de Luna was born and raised in Colorado. She has worked on numerous archaeological projects in the American West and Southwest, as well as in central and southern Mexico. She worked for the National Institute of Anthropology and History conducting the excavation and restoration of a...
Alba Menéndez Pereda
Areas of Interest:

Inca Empire, Andes, landscape studies, environmental humanities, built environment, architecture, materiality, sacredness, sensory experiences, sound studies, colonialism in the Americas, cross-cultural exchanges.

Alba Menéndez Pereda (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Interdepartmental Archaeology Graduate Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she studies the Inca Empire. In her doctoral research, Alba examines the making and experiencing of sacredness in the Inca capital of...
Iman Nagy
Iman Jamal Nagy is a Northeast African Landscape Archaeologist, Surveyor and student of Digital Humanities that has been a part of and conducted research projects in Northeast Africa and Southeast Asia. She earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures...
Carly Pope
Areas of Interest:

Pottery of Central America

Carly Pope was born and raised in Atlanta, GA. She earned her BA, with honors, in art and archaeology from Princeton University in 2016. Her senior thesis, on the topic of early pottery in Latin America, received the Frederick Barnard White thesis award. She presented her research at the annual...
Maryan Ragheb
Areas of Interest:

Egyptology

Maryan Ragheb was born in Egypt. She received BAs in both Egyptology and Business Administration, with a concentration on Management of Information Systems, from the American University in Cairo. With a fellowship from the Selz Foundation she continued at the same university to obtain a MA in...
Kellie Roddy
Areas of Interest:

Archaeology of western Mexico, specifically examining the rise of social differentiation in early classic Mesoamerican sites, and the development of household and political organization in prehispanic Mesoamerica.

 

Kellie Roddy earned BAs in both Archaeology and the History of Art from Brown University in 2015. After her graduation, she participated in cultural resource positions in several projects in Arizona, California, and New Mexico. Some of these were private projects, others were administered by the US...
Luis Rodriguez-Perez
Areas of Interest:

Urbanism and landscape in the Mediterranean during the Hellenistic & Roman period.  Topography of ancient sites. Applied photogrammetry and 3D modeling. Archaeological reconstruction of architectural sites. Religious syncretism and multi-culturalism in the Ancient World. Anthropological Ethnography. Public & Community-led archaeology.

Luis Rodriguez-Perez was born in Cuba and moved to Miami at a young age. He earned a BA in archaeology and history, with a minor in Classics, at the University of Southern California. He has participated in several excavation and survey projects in Italy and Greece, including at Pompeii, Vergina,...
Karla Saracay
Rachel Schloss
Areas of Interest:

Architectural Construction Technologies, Inca Archaeology, Andean Archaeology, Colonial Andes, Archaeology of Colonialism in the Americas, Adobe/ Mudbrick, Place-Making, Temporality, Geoarchaeology.

Rachel Schloss (she/her/hers) is a PhD student at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA. Her doctoral research focuses on architecture and construction (technology, adaptation, and meaning) in Inca architecture from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries AD. Before joining the Cotsen...
Baisakhi Sengupta
Areas of Interest:

Highland Archaeology, Himalayas Studies, Archaeology of Medieval North India, Gender and Masculine Subjectivity, Landscape and Space, Embodiment, Iconography, Figurine Studies, Human-Animal Studies, Multispecies Ecology.

Baisakhi Sengupta is a native of India. On completing her BA (hons.) in History at Hindu College, University of Delhi, India she received her MA and M.Phil. in Ancient History and Archaeology from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Baisakhi is interested in exploring the archaeology of...
Gabriel Silva Collins
Areas of Interest:

Pre-Hispanic Andean archaeology, Inca archaeology, environmental archaeology, borderlands and interregional exchange, wak'as, landscape archaeology

Gabriel Silva Collins earned his B.A. in Anthropology from Williams College in 2019. At Williams, he worked with Antonia Foias to study Aztec religious statues, and completed a thesis project that surveyed the interconnected system of Inca roads between Cusco and Huchuy Qosqo, Peru. Gabriel also...
Dominique Sparks-Stokes
Dominique Sparks-Stokes obtained her BA in archaeology with minors in anthropology and geology at the University of Cincinnati, followed by an MA in anthropology, with a focus on archaeology, from the same institution in 2019. During this time, she investigated the role that ceramic raw...
Matei Tichindelean
Areas of Interest:

Interactions between nomadic and settled population groups in Egypt and Sudan in the Bronze Age, with metal mining and working in the Eastern Desert of Egypt and the Sudan

Matei Tichindelean is a PhD candidate in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the interactions between nomadic peoples of northeast Africa and the settled populations along the Nile Valley. His dissertation combines...
Syon Vasquez
Areas of Interest:

Andean archaeology, Mesoamerican archaeology, historical archaeology

Syon Vasquez is a Ph.D. student in the Interdepartmental Archaeology Program at the University of California, Los Angeles.Prior to arriving at UCLA, Syon received his BA in anthropology from the University of South Florida. While completing his BA he participated in fieldwork at several Classic and...
Yen Chun Wang
Areas of Interest:

zooarchaeology, geoarchaeology, Austronesian, East and Southeast Asia

Yen Chun Wang received his BA in anthropology with a minor in geosciences from the National Taiwan University in 2020. Yen Chun focuses on the interactions between humans and their environments, but is also interested in topics such as spheres of interaction in East and Southeast Asia, and...
Zichao Wang
Areas of Interest:

History and civilization of early China, especially the political and cultural transformations in late Bronze Age and early Iron Age.

Zichao Wang received his BA in culture and arts management at Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, followed by an MA in comparative and public history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and another MA in East Asian studies at McGill University. His research covers the history and civilization of...
Zichan Wang
Areas of Interest:

The transitioning period from the late Neolithic to the early Bronze Age in China, which is a critical period to understand the emergence of civilization. 

Zichan Wang is from Jinan, Shandong, China. She obtained her BA and MA in archaeology at Shandong University. Her study in China mainly focused on Bronze Age. During her first year of graduate education she visited Tel Aviv University in Israel to study biblical archaeology, especially in the Iron...
Rachel Wood
Areas of Interest:

Areas of interests are headhunting, warfare, and cultural change and stagnation in ancient Gaul and Scythia because of Greco-Roman interaction and conquest.

Rachel Wood obtained a BA in Classical Archaeology and Anthropology from Florida State University in 2016 and her MA in Classical Archaeology from the same institution in 2018. Although most of her classwork concentrated on Roman and Greek archaeology, she became interested in the peripheral...
Wenyi Zhao