Congratulations to our four newly elected Junior Fellows this year!

Hakimah is conducting research that is rethinking the production of heritage in Senegal, with the goal of understanding the relationship between the place-based memorialization of particular pasts and the experiences people have of those places today. Her research brings her in contact with archivists, museum workers, and underwater archaeologists, as well as students, artists, and community members, to investigate the practices of heritage-making in Senegal. She is also pursuing graduate certificates in Africana Studies and Experimental Ethnography. Hakimah is an active member of the Anthropology Department’s Critical Museum Studies Working Group and Penn Cultural Heritage Center. Before pursuing her PhD Hakimah worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the African Art Curatorial Department. Before that she held positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Matters Foundation, The Studio Museum of Harlem, and The Smithsonian Institution Smithsonian Museum of African Art.

Matthew is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology whose work focuses on the precolonial southeastern United States. His dissertation project examines everyday life in the Natchez Bluffs region of the Lower Mississippi Valley and considers how ideas of home and belonging to a community are tied to material and landscape-scale spatial relationships. His project is connected to other work focused on paleoethnobotany, Indigenous archaeology, and landscape archaeology. He is currently a Board Member of the Penn Museum Graduate Advisory Council, a Penn Museum Graduate Guide, and a curatorial assistant for the Penn Museum’s Native North American Exhibition.

David Mulder received a BA from Wake Forest University in interdisciplinary studies with a thesis on the working methods of Neo-Assyrian sculptors at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu). He is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Art at Penn and is working on a dissertation that investigates notions of wildness, domesticity, and animality in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia, with a particular focus on the motif of the animal combat in glyptic art. While at Penn, he has participated in the legacy publication project and the renewed excavations at the site of Tell al-Hiba (ancient Lagash), Iraq, and has been involved in research and text writing for the renovated Eastern Mediterranean gallery at the Penn Museum, including an article in the accompanying issue of Expedition magazine. He has presented papers at the annual meeting of the American Society for Overseas Research (ASOR), the International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (ICAANE), and a colloquium of the Association for Coroplastic Studies. One article on the motif of the embracing couple in Old Babylonian terracotta plaques and another on a bitumen relief fragment from Neo-Elamite Susa are currently in press.