CV and Bio

Alison Kyra Carter received her BA from Oberlin College in 2001 and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2013. During high school and college she worked in two different bead stores - Bead in Hand in Oak Park, IL and Bead Paradise in Oberlin, OH. Through this work she was exposed to beads and bead traditions from around the world and began to pursue academic studies of beads, personal ornaments, and craft production in various Anthropology and Religion classes. Also at Oberlin, she took classes with Paula Richman, a scholar of South Asian religious traditions, and Anna Gade a scholar of Southeast Asian religions and Islam, which spurred her interests in these areas.

For graduate school, she wanted to continue her study of beads in South and Southeast Asia and applied to work with J. Mark Kenoyer at UW-Madison, one of the leading scholars on bead making and craft production in South Asia. Shortly after starting her graduate studies, she reached out to Miriam Stark at the University of Hawai'i and joined her LOMAP fieldwork in southern Cambodia in 2005. She fell in love with Cambodia on this trip and quickly shifted her PhD research focus to studying stone and glass beads in Cambodia. She later added sites in Thailand to her PhD research after participating in fieldwork at Ban Non Wat, Thailand, first with Charles Higham and later Nigel Chang. During graduate school she also began studying the Khmer language with Frank Smith at SEASSI and continues to study language with him.

Following completion of her PhD at UW-Madison, she taught classes in the Anthropology Department and then joined the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2015 as a Visiting Assistant Professor. In 2017, she left UIUC to join the Anthropology Department at the University of Oregon as an Assistant Professor. She is currently directing the Pteah Project (Project Excavating Ancient Households) with co-Director Miriam Stark, undertaking excavations of Angkorian residential spaces in Battambang, Cambodia.

She lives in Eugene with her husband and dog.

You can download a copy of my CV below (updated March 2021).

My Academia.edu page (with additional publications) is here.