Shannon A. Novak

• 2024 Fall
  • ANT 495 Research for Distinction in Anthropology
• 2024 Spring
  • ANT 499 Honors Capstone Project
  • ANT 131 Introduction to Biological Anthropology
  • ANT 631 Method and Theory in Biological Anthropology
  • ANT 400/600 Selected Topics - Bioarchaeology II
• 2023 Fall
  • ANT 436/636 Bioarchaeology
  • ANT 495 Research for Distinction in Anthropology
• 2023 Spring
  • ANT 631 Method and Theory in Biological Anthropology
  • ANT 400/600 Selected Topics - Excavating Bodies in Archives

As an anthropologist, I seek to understand human bodies as living beings, material substances, and cultural symbols. To do so involves following variable tissues and traces that persist across generations and geographies. My fieldwork, in turn, takes place in multiple settings, including ethnographic sites, as well as archives,  laboratories, and archaeological excavations. Broadly trained in bioarchaeology and social theory, my research is especially concerned with multiple ontologies of the body and ”more-than-human” assemblages. In one form or another, my studies have engaged with ruptures that occurred across the long nineteenth-century and whose resonances are experienced in the present. 

My most recent work stems from the movement of indentured laborers from India to the Caribbean—in particular, British Guiana—to replace enslaved Africans on sugar plantations following emancipation. From distant colonies these workers brought traces of their homeland, including plants and practices that would animate social and material landscapes in new ways. This included subaltern healing practices associated with the goddess Mariamman, better known by her Sanskrit name, Kali. In the wake of plantations, these rural practices were revitalized in independent Guyana and, in the past three decades, transplanted to North American cities where thousands of Indo-Guyanese settled in the U.S. and Canada. Since 2016, I have been conducting ethnographic research on the outskirts of Toronto at the first Mariamman temple established there. I introduce my work on transnational ritual ecologies in a forthcoming edited volume, "Embodying Diversity." My chapter, “Plot-life in Flower City,” serves as the framework for a monograph that I am currently developing.  

Not unrelated, though a congregation of a different sort, is a previous project that is currently being synthesized. The Spring Street Presbyterian Church in New York City was a site of worship and social action in the first half of the nineteenth century. By gathering as a mixed-raced congregation and promoting a radical abolitionist stance, the church became a target during the 1834 race riots. Memories and materials associated with this now defunct institution were inadvertently exposed during recent construction in lower Manhattan. Excavation of the church burial vaults (ca. 1820-1840) recovered mortuary artifacts and commingled skeletons of some 200 peoples. These remains offer fascinating insights on a community who gathered in response to dramatic social, economic, and ecological upheavals brought on by an accelerating global economy. Archival records and family histories are being integrated with the skeletal findings to examine migration, disease, labor, and social identities in this diverse group. Collaborations with historians and archaeologists, artists and filmmakers, and geo- and biomolecular scientists, among others, are being integrated into an edited volume.

The questions and concerns involved in these current studies emerge from my earlier research on the American West. Here, traces of the past continue to haunt landscapes and the living, destabilizing and transforming identities in unexpected ways. My first book, "House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre" (2008), examines the murder of some 120 men, women, and children in 1857 by a local militia in the Utah Territory. My analysis of skeletal remains from the massacre site is integrated with archival records and oral histories to offer a portrait of the victims as individuals, family members, cultural beings, and living bodies. Ethnographic and ethnohistoric research in both Utah and Arkansas, drew my attention towards the living and questions regarding how the victims’ bodies and biographies have been deployed in cultural politics over some 150 years. These findings are elaborated in a series of journal articles and edited volumes.

My second book, "An Archaeology of Desperation" (2011), is a co-edited volume that synthesizes the findings from excavations at the Donner family encampment in the Sierra Nevada. Here, a contingent of overland emigrants became snowbound during the winter of 1846-47 and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. In this book, specialists weave together lines of evidence from archaeology, history, ecology, and osteology to reflect on human social behavior under extreme conditions. Both books received the James Deetz Award from the Society for Historical Archaeology.

• Books
  • Novak, S. A., "Thematic Issue: Historical Bioarchaeology." Historical Archaeology, 2020.
  • An Archaeology of Desperation: Exploring the Donner Party’s Alder Creek Camp. Dixon, K. J., Schablitsky, J. M. and Novak, S. A. (eds.) University of Oklahoma, 2011.
  • Novak, S. A., House of Mourning: A Biocultural History of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. University of Utah Press, 2008.
• Journal Articles
  • Warner-Smith, A., Novak, S., "History and Bioarchaeology." In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Oxford University Press, 2024.
  • Novak, S., "Sketchbook Archaeology: Bodies Multiple and the Archives They Create." Journal of Social Archaeology, 2022.
  • Hosek, L., Warner-Smith, A. and Novak, S. A., "The Body as (in, and with) Text: Doing Bioarchaeology with Archives." Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 2021.
  • Novak, S., Warner-Smith, A. L., "Assembling Heads and Circulating Tales: The Doings and Undoings of Specimen 2032." Historical Archaeology, 2020.
  • Novak, S., Warner-Smith, A. L., "Vital Data: Re/Introducing Historical Bioarchaeology." Historical Archaeology, 2020.
  • Novak, S., "Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street." Deja Lu, 2019.
  • Novak, S., "Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives: Unpacking the Pews at Spring Street." American Anthropologist, 2017.
• Book Chapters
  • Novak, S. A., "Blood, Mud, and Mucking Around with Waste: Properties of Reworlding Postindustrial Space." In Routledge Handbook of Feminist Anthropology. Routledge, 2025.
  • Novak, S. A., "Plot-life in Flower City: Transnational Ritual Ecologies in the Wake of Plantations." In Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty. Gagnon, T. (ed.) University of Arizona Press, 2024.
  • Novak, S., "Talking Heads and Other Specters of the Mountain Meadows Massacre." In Studies in Forensic Biohistory: Anthropological Perspectives. , 2017.
  • Novak, S., "On the Stories of Men and the Substance of Women: Interrogating Gender Through Violence." In Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology. , 2017.
  • Novak, S., "Partible Persons or Persons Apart: Postmortem Interventions at the Spring Street Presbyterian Church, Manhattan." In Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. , 2017.
  • Rodseth, L., Novak, S. A., "Placing the Dead at Mountain Meadows." In Battles and Massacres on the Southwestern Frontier: Historical and Archaeological Perspectives. Wetherington, R. K., Levine, F. (eds.) University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.
  • Novak, S., "How to Say Things with Bodies: Meaningful Violence on an American Frontier." In The Routledge Handbook of the Bioarchaeology of Human Conflict. , 2013.
• Book Review
  • Novak, S. A., Pykles, B. C., "Excavating Nauvoo: The Mormons and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in America." Journal of Anthropological Research, 2011.
• Magazine/Trade Publication
  • Novak, S. A., "Remembering an Abolitionist Congregation and Cultivating Heritage Landscapes." In Public Gardens. , 2023.

TAG (May 22, 2024)

Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, "Archival Shapeshifting: Wandering and Wondering With, and Beyond, the Page" (November 16, 2023)

SAR, NSF Research Team Seminar: Excavating Bodies in the Archives: Generating New Methods and Collaborations, "Archival Shapeshifting: On the Muddy Paths of Transcendence between Nations and Altered States" (May 1, 2023 - May 5, 2023)

Annual Meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology, "Archival Shapeshifting: On the Muddy Paths of Transcendence Between Nation-States" (January 4, 2023 - January 7, 2023)

New York Conference of Asian Studies, Co-Organized Panel: Alternative Regimes of Power and Protection: Ritual Interiors and Experiential Infrastructures of Society and State., "Playgrounds in Wastelands: Embodied Repertoires of Play, Power, and Persuasion" (October 6, 2022 - October 7, 2022)

South Asia Center of Syracuse University Speaker Series, Maxwell School, Syracuse University, "Plot-Life in Flower City: Transnational Ritual Ecologies in the Wake of Plantations" (April 22, 2022)

Relics and Continuities in Europe: An Interdisciplinary Symposium, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, Princeton University, "Discussant for Ioanna Paraskevopoulou, "Digested Bones and Harmful Practices: Digestive Plots at the Third Cemetery of Athens."" (March 4, 2022 - March 6, 2022)

Gladyck, S., Novak, S. A., Barta, J. L., American Academy of Forensic Sciences Annual Conference, "Examining the Ancestry of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church Burial Vault Population Using mtDNA Analysis" (February 21, 2022 - February 25, 2022)

Paper to be presented at the annual meetings of the Society for Historical Archaeology, "Sketchbook (Bio)archaeology: Bodies Multiple and the Archives they (Re)create" (2022)

Faculty Advisor of the Year, Maxwell School (April 30, 2024)