Ian Kuijt

Professor of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame
Ian Kuijt is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in the social geography of village life within small-scale prehistoric and historic communities. Drawing upon ethnography, social theory, and archaeology, his scholarship is focused primarily on emerging social inequality, identity, and the construction of community through ritual and economic means.

Professor Kuijt is the author or co-editor of seven books, including Transformation by Fire: The Archaeology of Cremation in Cultural Context (2014); People of the Middle Fraser Canyon: An Archaeological History (2012); Macroevolution in Human Prehistory (2009); and Life in Neolithic Farming Communities: Social Organization, Identity, and Differentiation (2000). His most recent co-authored book, Island Places, Island Times (2015), employs photographic recognition software to play 23 linked two-minute films designed, filmed, and produced by Wiliam Donaruma (Notre Dame, Film Television and Theater) and Kuijt. He has written over one hundred scholarly articles, including publications in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Current Anthropology, American Antiquity, The Journal of Economic Anthropology, and The Journal of Archaeological Science. He serves on a number of editorial boards, including Antiquity and Paléorient.

Professor Kuijt’s research has been supported by major fellowships and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the University of Notre Dame Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Amerind Foundation, the John Tynan Foundation, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation-Spanish Agency for International Cooperation, Spain, the John Templeton Foundation, the British Academy, the Mellon Foundation, and the Sigma Xi Foundation. In 2005 he was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and in 2009 he served as the Naughton Distinguished Visiting Professor, Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.