Anthropology graduate students awarded NEH Fellowships and Student Paper Prize

Four members of Wayne State University’s Femme Beings Project have been selected as 2025 fellows of the NEH Community Deep Mapping Institute. Julie Julison, Sarah Pounders, Ana Saenz and Mozelle Bowers will receive training and resources to develop a digital deep map using historical, geospatial and archaeological data they’ve gathered to visualize the connections between Detroit’s Potomac Quarter and the female sex workers who lived there nearly 150 years ago.

As part of the fellowship, the researchers will attend monthly virtual workshops and participate in a two-week residency at Michigan Technological University’s Geospatial Research Facility in Houghton this July.

Wayne State students also made a strong showing at this year’s Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) annual conference in New Orleans. Undergraduate Amanda Stockton and graduate students Julison, Pounders, Saenz, Carson Manfred and Samantha Ellens presented research on various archaeological contexts. Julison, Pounders and Saenz won the conference’s Student Paper Prize.

The 2026 SHA conference will be held in Detroit at the Renaissance Center Marriott from Jan. 7-10.