Lauren
Kapsalakis
John C. Slater Fellow in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
woman smiling with glasses and wavy hair

Lauren Kapsalakis is a Ph.D. student in history, anthropology, science, technology, and society (HASTS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her research concerns charting changes in anthropological pedagogy, methodology, and ethnographic fieldwork techniques throughout the 20th century in the US and Latin America. Through archival investigation into six field schools that trained anthropologists from the 1930s to the 1970s, her dissertation examines how anthropologists formalized the unteachable experience of fieldwork into a set of practices drilled into students learning to analyze and interpret the world collaboratively. Kapsalakis received an undergraduate and master’s degree in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and serves as an editor for the History of Anthropology Newsletter (HAN).

Research Project: “Pedagogy, Practice, and Place: Field Schools as Laboratories in American Anthropology, 1929-1975”