Danielle Raad PhD » Team

Danielle Raad is an anthropologist, educator, and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Academic Affairs and Outreach at the Yale University Art Gallery. In this current role, she practices art-based pedagogies and focuses on expanding university-level curricular engagement with the museum’s collections. Over the summer of 2023, Danielle will become Curator of the Stanford University Archaeological Collections and Assistant Director of Collections of the Stanford Archaeology Center.

Danielle completed a PhD in Anthropology and a Graduate Certificate in Public History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a graduate of Lesley University (MEd, Secondary Education), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (SM, Materials Science and Engineering), Harvard University (MA, Chemistry), and Brown University (BSc, Chemistry). An experienced educator, Danielle has been a high school teacher and community college instructor and has developed and published innovative interdisciplinary curricula in physics and archaeology.

An “orogenic ethnographer,” Danielle studies the making of place on mountain landscapes. Her first book project is an ethnography of Mount Holyoke, a peak in western Massachusetts with an iconic view from the summit and distinctive flora, fauna, and geology with which many people in the region have a deep personal connection. She explores how environmental and historical consciousness are interrelated and how attachments to place are influenced by cultural movements as well as collective, family, and individual memory. This multi-stranded story considers community activism (the work of environmental conservationists and historic preservationists), the creation and propagation of historical narratives and visions of the landscape, and engagements with the more-than-human environment over two centuries. Danielle has also written about the creation of a collective vision of American mountain landscapes through the dissemination of visual media and the ways in which this vision is implicated in colonizing, nationalizing, and exclusionary processes.

Conceptualizing veganism as an anthropological theoretical lens through which to analyze how systems of oppression in human societies are reproduced in our interactions with nonhuman animals, Danielle enacts veganism as a performative feminist and de-colonizing stance that rejects and bears witness to both human and nonhuman animal injustices.