Mentors and Team

Mentors

coming soon

Current Team

Victoria Newhall is a third year archaeology graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA. Her research explores emergent social inequality and the development of socio-political complexity in Formative Mesoamerica through the lens of foodways and paleoethnobotanical methods. She is interested in social identity, and issues of equity and diversity as they relate to the discipline of archeology. Victoria is a non-traditional student who transferred from Santa Barbara City College to UCSB for undergraduate degree. She is dedicated to mentoring students who are navigating similar pathways in their higher education.

Fahad Bagdadi is interested in the history and archaeology of his native Western Arabia. His main focus is understanding the early history and migrations through Northwestern Arabia, the interactions between and formations of different people and their different ways of living (settled, nomadic, and everything in between and beyond these over-simplified formulations), and the flow of ideas from outside and into Arabian cultures, especially across the Red Sea. One of Fahad’s main focuses is understanding neolithic stone carving tools and technologies, and the religious and ideological climate leading up to the formation of the first states in the region. Initially being admitted to UCLA as a physics major, he found himself interested in how the adoption of different political and economic systems affects people, and thus switched to pursuing a Bachelor of Science in anthropology with a focus on economic anthropology and statistical analysis— and finally landed on pursuing archaeology, hoping to bring all the skills he learned into his study of the archaeology of the Arabian peninsula. Having joined an archeology research program in Cortez, Colorado in 2022, he’s hoping to continue honing his archaeological skills as he applies to graduate programs while completing his undergraduate degree.

Farah Mosbah is an Egyptian first-generation student who immigrated to America in 2011 during the Arab uprising. She joined a study abroad trip as a student at Santa Monica College to Belize and Guatemala, where she learned about Belizean and Guatemalan culture, archaeological history, and visited various sites that inspired her love for archaeology. In 2019 Farah was accepted to UCLA where she volunteered in the Zooarchaeology lab, worked as a research assistant in the Armenian Lab, and conducted independent research in the Undergraduate Research Fellows Program. Her research was titled “English Use in Egypt: How Western Standards and Image-Making Practices Intersect with Language Ideologies and Identity.” Farah graduated from UCLA in 2021 with honors and decided to take a gap year to work in Cultural Resource Management (CRM). She continues to explore her career goals as she works as an Archaeologist and is currently a Registrar and Collections Management intern at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

Taylor Carr-Howard is a second-year PhD student in Archaeology at UCLA. Her research focuses on the role early archaeological photographs play in classical archaeology’s colonial histories. Taylor received her B.A. in Art History from Scripps College in 2017 and her M.A. in Archaeology from Cornell University in 2020. As an undergraduate, Taylor felt pulled in two different directions as she took classes and pursued research in both contemporary art/photography and classical archaeology. When it came time to write a senior thesis, she felt like she had to make a choice between the two and decided to write her thesis on mosaics in the Roman provinces. During her last semester at Scripps, Taylor took a class on cultural heritage where she wrote a paper on photography and cultural heritage – as soon as she figured out that she could combine the study of Roman archaeology and photography, there was no going back. 

Past Team 

Carly Pope is a PhD candidate in the Archaeology Interdepartmental Program at UCLA, despite the advice she received from several of her undergraduate professors at Princeton University to reconsider archaeology as a career. In her junior year, she switched her focus from Roman to Latin American archaeology and was accepted into the only graduate program to which she applied. Carly first took a gap year to travel and work on different archaeology projects. She then completed her MA in archaeology at University College London, where she began focusing on ceramic analysis and wrote a thesis that examined pottery used for Maya salt production in Belize. During a second gap year, she worked to pay off student loans and presented her research at a conference where she met her current advisor at UCLA. Her research examines trade through the analysis of ceramics from coastal Panama.

Brittney Perez is a first generation Chicana student from East Los Angeles. She was a transfer student from Pasadena City College, and is currently in her senior year at UCLA as an anthropology major. While at UCLA she has also worked as a mentor to fellow transfer students interested in anthropology. She had originally aimed to pursue linguistic anthropology, focusing on multilingualism in children, but soon found her passion in ceramic analysis, and heritage preservation instead. In the summer of 2021 she worked abroad on the sites of Ferrycarrig and Ferns, Ireland, excavating two of the first Anglo-Norman settlements in Ireland. The experience inspired her to find ways to make similar opportunities more accessible to her fellow BIPOC undergraduate students. Brittney aims to attend grad school next fall and to continue her studies in the field of archaeology. 

Jackeline Lopez is a first-generation Mexican-Salvadoran Latina from South Central Los Angeles and a recent UCLA graduate. She returned to Santa Monica College in her mid-twenties, where she had the opportunity to join an archaeological project in rural Portugal for two consecutive field seasons. After transferring to UCLA in 2019, Jackeline wrote a thesis focused on concepts of human/animal interactions in Mesoamerican Art for the Lemelson Anthropological Honors Program and was a Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow (MCUF) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for two years. She has since been hired as a Curatorial Administrator in LACMA’s Art of the Ancient Americas department. As a non-traditional and long-time community college student, her goal in this program is to help undergraduate and BIPOC students make informed decisions about archaeology or adjacent field paths in the early stages of their academic careers.