Katherine Kinkopf

I’m an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at NC State in Raleigh, NC. I earned my PhD and M.A. in Anthropology from UC Berkeley, and my A.B. in Anthropology and English from the University of Michigan.

My work documents the deep, embodied, and historically contextual experiences of disability at many scales (population, collective, individual) by engaging with critical disability studies, disability communities, and disability justice activism. My technical expertise is in cross-sectional geometry, human osteology, gross anatomy, and non-destructive and medical imaging techniques. I specialize in archival and collections-based research.

I’m interested in big questions about disability and experience:

  • What does it mean to be disabled, now and in the past?

  • Does disability, as a political identity, exist in the past? If yes, what are these disability experiences and how can we access them? If not, how can we study descriptively disabled peoples’ experiences so as not to erase them?

  • How do eugenic beliefs and politics shape the practice of science, our knowledge of the human body and its physiology, and our understanding of human evolution?

This research takes me to previously-excavated skeletal collections, historical archives, museums, and digital databases primarily in the United States and Italian Peninsula, where I use an array of quantitative and qualitative approaches in ethically-minded research.

Contact me

I am passionate about quantitative literacy, and applying supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques to biological data. I am always happy to consult or support other anthropologists, scientists, or students interested in developing their skills in this area through formal collaboration or informal discussion.

I am accepting new M.A. students. Email me to see if we could be a good fit!

You can find my latest scholarship via Google Scholar, ResearchGate, or my Publications page. The easiest way to contact me, set up a meeting, or request free pdfs of my work is via email: kmkinkopf@ncsu.edu

A light-skinned woman with long brown hair looks down at a set of early 20th century papers with blue and black handwritten text housed in a flip book
Katie, a person wearing a pink beanie and a purple jacket crouches in front of historic grave markers at a cemetery in remote West Texas. The habitat is mostly desert scrub, sand, and some yucca and Nolina