Danielle Raad PhD » Team

Danielle Raad is an anthropologist, educator, and the Curator and Assistant Director of the Stanford University Archaeology Collections. In this role, she oversees all aspects of SUAC operations, acquisitions, registration, collections management, education, research, and outreach.

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. As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Academic Affairs and Outreach at the Yale University Art Gallery, Danielle practiced art-based pedagogies, expanded university-level curricular engagement with the museum’s collections, and co-curated a photography installation.

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.

Danielle conceptualizes 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, and as one form of activism toward social and political change. She practices veganism as a performative feminist and de-colonizing stance, a series of conscious acts of solidarity, that bears witness to and rejects routine and systemic harms inflicted upon humans and nonhuman animals.