Graduate Student Spotlight Fall 2026

Cristian Figueroa (Archaeology, PhD in Progress)

Cristian Figueroa’s primary research investigates questions related to shifting social identities across time as a result of local and interregional interaction, migration, and exchange. Cristian takes an interdisciplinary approach, bringing together methodologies from anthropological archaeology, linguistic anthropology, art history, Indigenous ontologies, and queer studies to comprehend how social identity is constructed and (re)shaped as a result of interactions with various social spheres and landscapes. Cristian is currently analyzing material collections from the Comcaac Indigenous community in Sonora, México to explore the human and other-than-human interactions and what these interactions reveal about the persistence of Comcaac cosmologies spanning from the pre-European contact period through counterparty times.