Melissa F. Baird

Melissa F. Baird

Contact

Personal Website

  • Associate Professor of Anthropology
  • Associate Dean of STEM Equity, Graduate School
  • Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Anthropology, Stanford Archaeology Center, and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, 2011-2013
  • PhD, Anthropology, University of Oregon
  • BA Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

About:

Melissa F. Baird is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University (USA). A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (BA), she earned both MS and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Oregon.  Her research has focused on the politics of heritage in extractive zones, and, more recently, connecting anthropological tools and methods to address environmental and societal challenges. She is the author of Critical Theory and the Anthropology of Heritage Landscapes (2017), which drew on over a decade of fieldwork to investigate the sociopolitical contexts of landscapes as heritage. In 2020, she was elected as president of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies

Research Interests

  • Extractive zones
  • STEMM Equity in Higher ED
  • Forensic & Ethnographic methods