Associate Dean of STEM Equity, Graduate School





Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Anthropology, Stanford Archaeology Center, and Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, 2011-2013
Ph.D., Anthropology, University of Oregon
BA Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley



About:
Melissa F. Baird is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University (USA). A graduate of the University of California, Berkeley (BA), she earned both MS and Ph.D. degrees at the University of Oregon.  Her research has focused on the politics of heritage in extractive zones and, more recently, connecting anthropological tools and methods to address environmental and societal challenges. She is the author of Critical Theory and the Anthropology of Heritage Landscapes (2017), which drew on over a decade of fieldwork to investigate the sociopolitical contexts of landscapes as heritage. In 2020, she was elected as president of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies



Research Interests

Extractive zones
STEMM Equity in Higher ED
Forensic and Ethnographic methods