Heartfelt Thanks to Chelsea Blackmore

By Megan Moodie, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director

     The faculty, staff, and students of the Department of Anthropology extend heartfelt thanks to Assistant Professor Chelsea Blackmore for her outstanding scholarship, teaching, and service over the last nine years. Dr. Blackmore received her Ph.D. in 2008 from UC Riverside, and was subsequently awarded a prestigious UC Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship; she joined the faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 2010.

     A specialist in pre-Columbian Meso-American archaeology, Dr. Blackmore is also at the forefront of the emergent field of queer archaeology, which is generally concerned with how we understand difference in the past: What forms of inequality predominated in ancient Mayan settlements? How did those on the bottom of social hierarchies experience their world? What role, if any, did gender and sexuality play in these social formations? Dr. Blackmore’s article “How to Queer the Past Without Sex” is the most downloaded article from the flagship journal Archaeologies since 2014.

     Dr. Blackmore has always worked to combine scholarship and activism, bringing a social justice-based perspective to her research and her classrooms that attracted countless students to anthropology and benefitted all of us in innumerable ways. She is a beloved colleague, mentor, teacher, and friend, and her impact on the Anthropology Department is fundamental and lasting.

     This summer, Dr. Blackmore joins Albion Environmental Inc. as a Senior Archaeologist. Albion is a local, woman-owned business dedicated to cultural and natural resource management, which works on a variety of important projects across California’s Central Coast.