Philip Scher’s edited volume–Caribbean: A Reader in Culture, History, and Representation–was just published by Wiley. Click here for more information.

Stephen Wooten’s new book “The Art of Livelihood: Creating Expressive Agri-Culture in Rural Mali” was just published by Carolina Academic Press. Click here for more information.

Steve Frost is part of an international team of researchers who are featured in the latest issue of Science for their research on the early hominin Ardipithecus ramidus. Check out the NY Times story.

Graduate student Tracy Garcia was awarded a Smithsonian Fellowship for the summer to work on archaeological collections from the California Channel Islands that are housed at the National Museum of Natural History. The fellowship was arranged, in part, by Dr. Torben Rick, who Tracy is now working with in Washington DC.

Graduate student Aaron Blackwell received a Completion Award from the University of Oregon Graduate School. The award will support Aaron for the Fall 2009 term as he completes his dissertation.

Dennis Jenkins has been chosen as the winner of the Earle A. Chiles Award, an honor given by the High Desert Museum in Bend that recognizes outstanding contributions to the history of the state. The $15,000 award will be presented to Jenkins at the Earle A. Chiles Award Banquet in Portland on December 1. See the full press release here.

Josh Snodgrass, along with a team of researchers at the Oregon Social Learning Center (with Deborah Capaldi as the Principal Investigator), was awarded a 5-year, $3 million NIH grant by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The project (Risk for dysfunctional romantic relationships for adults) involves a significant biomarker component, and the UO portion of the award (approximately $215,000) will fund graduate students and laboratory analyses.

Frances White will be the final speaker in the Leakey Foundation’s “Leakey and Darwin: Revolutionaries” lecture series. Her talk, which focuses on her bonobo research (”What’s Love Got To Do With It? Sex for Social Bonding in Bonobos”), is scheduled for Saturday, September 5 at the Field Museum in Chicago.

Graduate student Felicia Madimenos received an NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant for her project “Lifestyle and Reproductive Effects on Bone Mineral Density in an Amazonian Forager-Horticulturalist Population”. The project is supervised by advisor Josh Snodgrass.

Graduate student Aaron Blackwell received a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California at Santa Barbara to work on the NSF and NIH-funded Tsimane Life History Project with Mike Gurven and Hilly Kaplan. The position will begin in January 2010.