Pamela L. Geller

Pamela L. Geller is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL). Over the years, she has conducted fieldwork in Hawaii, Belize, Honduras, Perú, and Haiti. Her intellectual interests include archaeology and bioarchaeology, feminist and queer studies, materiality of identity, the sociopolitics of the past, and bioethics. Based on her research, she has authored several books: The Bioarchaeology of Social-Sexual Lives (2017), Theorizing Bioarchaeology (2021), and Becoming Object: The Sociopolitics of the Samuel George Morton Cranial Collection (2024).

More recently, she has wondered, “What does it mean to be human in an age of unprecedented anthropogenic impact on this planet?” The question is a longstanding one for anthropology; it seeks to address how the human condition shifts with technological innovation and socioeconomic interaction, as was the case during the Neolithic or Industrial Revolutions. Yet rather than look to ancient periods, she is undertaking an archaeology of the contemporary that focuses on plastics as material culture in the 21st century. Her writings about plastics have appeared in Slate, Miami Herald, The New York Times, and The Conversation.

***Do note that she has a name doppelgänger whose political positions she finds fairly abhorrent.