Sarah E. Wagner
Professor of Anthropology, The George Washington University

Sarah Wagner is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on post-conflict societies, memory, forensic science applied in the wake of war, and, most recently, on COVID-19 death and mourning. She is the author of To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing and What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War, and co-editor (with Sarah L. Richardson and Ruth E. Toulson) of the Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Death.

Martha Greenwald
Senior Researcher

Martha Greenwald is the Founding Director, Creator,  and Curator of The WhoWeLost Project. Who We Lost: A Portable COVID Memorial, an anthology based on the WhoWeLost.org website, was published by Belt Publishing in May 2023. She is Special Advisor to “Rituals in the Making,” a pandemic remembrance project under the auspices of George Washington University’s Anthropology Department. Martha is also the author of the poetry collection Other Prohibited Items, which won the Mississippi Review Prize for Poetry. In 2020, she was the first prize winner of the Yeats Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Rattle, Nurture, Slate, Best New Poets, The Threepenny Review, and numerous other journals and anthologies.  She has been been both a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford and a Pearl Hogrefe Fellow at Iowa State, and has received fellowships from the Kentucky and North Carolina Arts Councils.  She taught creative writing, literature, and ESL at the high school and college level for nearly twenty years. Born and raised on the Jersey shore, Martha lives, works, and writes in Louisville, Kentucky.

María José Peláez Sierra
Ph.D. Student in Linguistic Anthropology

Maria Jose is a Ph.D candidate in linguistic anthropology at the George Washington University. Her dissertation examines how the “promise” of an Alzheimer’s cure moves (materially and semiotically) between Colombia and the US, shaping state interactions and turning geographies into sites of medical anticipation and governance.

Paige Gavin 
Researcher

Paige Gavin completed a dual BA/MA degree in anthropology at the George Washington University with a focus on medical anthropology. Her interests include the areas of death and dying, various grief forms, memorialization of COVID deaths, and trauma of healthcare workers. She has previous research and volunteer experience with hospice care and is working on the Rituals in the Making project by recording various forms of COVID-19 memorials in the United States.  

Hanaan Khabir
Researcher

Hanaan Khabir is a student in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences at George Washington University, pursuing a B.S. in Biological Anthropology. They joined the study in Fall 2023 to assist with COVID periodization as it relates to the use of social media and hashtags. They have experience working in the healthcare field and, outside of COVID, Hanaan interests lie in medical anthropology as it relates to women and minorities.

Avery Nennmann
Researcher

Avery Nennmann is a medical anthropologist with a BS in Biomedical Sciences and Neuroscience from Texas A&M University (2022) and an MA in Medical Anthropology from George Washington University (2024). Her research with Rituals in the Making has focused on the embodiment of care and the lived experiences of patients and healthcare providers during the COVID-19 pandemic. She is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at Southern Methodist University.

Roy Richard Grinker
Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, The George Washington University

Roy Grinker conducts cross-cultural research on mental illness, developmental disorders, and stigma. In addition to studying grief, mourning, and memorialization in the COVID-19 pandemic, he specializes in the study of ethnicity, nationalism, and psychological anthropology; is the director of GW’s Institute for Ethnographic Research; and editor-in-chief of of the journal Anthropological Quarterly. He is the author of Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness. 

Joel C. Kuipers
Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs, The George Washington University

Joel Kuipers has carried out extensive ethnographic analyses of the role of language in “troubles” in the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, in US psychiatric clinics, U.S. science classrooms, COVID-related Zoom funerals, and among teenage cell phone users. His research focuses on how authoritative discourse shapes institutionally defined activities in clinics, courtrooms, classrooms and religious settings. He is Director of GW’s Discourse Laboratory.

 Sarah Frieman  

Sarah Frieman is an anthropology student at the George Washington University. She joined the research team in the Spring of 2022 and has assisted in the study of COVID-19 memorialization efforts in comparison to contested-information actions. In addition to COVID-19 research, her areas of interest include the study of cultural diasporas, migration and borders, and identity-forming knowledge production. 

Maura Kelly-Yuoh  

Maura Kelly-Yuoh is a student in the Milken Institute at The George Washington University pursuing a B.S. in Public Health. She is focused on maternal and child health as well as biological anthropology, with previous experience in gestational diabetes research and mental health care availability and licensure. She joined this project in early 2021 to assist with the investigation of COVID-19 remembrance on social media and is currently analyzing the evolution of advocacy groups throughout the pandemic. 

Sebastian Sirais  

Sebastian Sirais is an International Affairs student at The George Washington University. Having joined the project in the fall of 2021, he is assisting with the study of COVID-19 memorialization, and with analyzing data related to the spread of misinformation and disinformation on social media.