Anthropology welcomes their new professor, Darcie DeAngelo

The Department of Anthropology welcomes its newest professor, Darcie DeAngelo (she/her). We caught up with Darcie and asked some questions to get to know her!

Q: Could you tell us a little bit about your professional background, and what you’ve enjoyed the most about your career so far?

A: I am an anthropologist by training with specialties in visual anthropology, (meaning that I often use videography and media in my analyses), as well as the anthropology of medicine and environmental anthropology. The best part of being an anthropologist is the capacity to step into other people's worlds and take those worlds seriously as your research. I love conducting fieldwork and asking people questions that they themselves often find very obvious but from an outside perspective can reveal new concepts and understandings. I also love imparting those methods to students so they can learn to see new worlds, too.

Q: What inspired you to enter this field?

A: When I was younger I was a huge science fiction nerd and all my favorite science fiction authors had backgrounds in anthropology. I admired their writing and their thinking and emulated them. When I entered my undergraduate degree, I never wavered from my choice to major in anthropology and have continued training in it since.

Q: Tell us about your research?

A: I first became interested in studying how people heal when I worked on racial disparities in mental health in the United States. From that training I entered graduate school in anthropology and I approached Cambodia as my field site, a place where people had suffered recent wars and, as a consequence, lived in military wastelands. My first fieldwork took place on minefields at a remote biomedical workshop that produced and repaired prosthesis limbs for those who had needed amputations after landmines injured them. I saw how the environment both was produced by war and produced effects on people in ways that could be described as physiological, psychological, and spiritual. The Cambodian minefields were places where the environment, war, and medicine clearly intertwined.

When I conducted fieldwork on minefields, I could not walk anywhere. That kind of immobility inspired me to follow people who could walk on this dangerous ground, those who worked in landmine detection. While spending time with deminers, I started getting interested in the animals people used to help them clear the land of military waste in Cambodia. In 2015, they were training a new animal for this, the landmine detection rat. I was able to follow the implementation process of that training. The book for this project, How to Love a Rat: Detecting Bombs in Postwar Cambodia, is an academic book that is coming out with the University of California Press in the fall 2024.

Now, on my second book project that I partly wrote under the Annie Clark Tanner Fellowship at the University of Utah in 2023-2024, I am exploring rats in other ways and through other stories. This book, which is a nonfiction trade book, features the Alberta Rat Patrol and other human-rat relations across time and space worldwide. What helps me understand the environment, which is a huge word with multiple networked actors, are its micro relations. So, I find it easier to think about global events like climate change and environmental devastation through pest-human relations—how humans interact with rats tells us how humans relate to the environment writ large.

Q: Tell us about your teaching?

A: My teaching incorporates my research interests. I like to ask students to produce media projects and creative weird writings about human-animal relations, especially attending to the concepts they make that categorize such beings. I teach courses that always involve some sort of independent research and always try to integrate student fieldwork exercises into my course curricula. This semester I am teaching environmental anthropology and in the winter 2025, I will teach a seminar called Pests, Pets, and Parasites.

Q: What are your impressions of Edmonton/the University of Alberta so far (if applicable)?

A: I was luckily able to visit Edmonton while driving across Canada way back as a graduate student. It remains the same today--a city with beautiful access to a twisting network of trails and with delicious food. I haven't been at the University of Alberta long, but so far I have seen strong community building among faculty members and students.

Q: What are your hobbies, or things you like to do outside of work?

A: I am an avid mountain biker and have already tried out some of the River Valley trails in Edmonton. I'm hoping that there will be cross-country skiing this winter, because I hear it is a long season! I try to develop lots of activities in my life that are not career-oriented. I alpine ski, trail run, do yoga, and paint both with watercolors and oils. I am a perpetual amateur in all these things, but they are really fun.

Welcome to Anthropology, Darcie! We are glad you are here!