Katherine Kinkopf
Education
PhD Anthropology University of California, Berkeley 2020
MA Anthropology University of California, Berkeley 2016
AB English Literature; Anthropology (honors) University of Michigan 2014
Area(s) of Expertise
My work documents embodied 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 minimally invasive medical imaging techniques. I specialize in archival and collections-based research.
I’m interested in big biocultural questions about disability:
What does it mean to be disabled, now and in the past?
Does disability, as a political identity, exist in the past? When it does, what characterizes these embodied experiences and how can we access them? When it's not clear that disability existed as a political identity, 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 and health?
Currently, I serve on the Board for the Society for Disability Studies (elected 2025).
Publications
- Making Space for Disability Expertise in Bioarchaeology , Bioarchaeology International (2025)
- Black Disability Politics in Black Military Service: A Perspective from Nineteenth-Century Fort Davis, Texas , Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage (2023)
- Growing Up at Villamagna , Bioarchaeology International (2023)
- Contextualizing bilateral asymmetry and gender: A multivariate approach to femoral cross‐sectional geometry at rural Medieval Pieve di Pava, Italy , American Journal of Biological Anthropology (2022)
- Disability Beyond Disease: A Bioarchaeological Study of Access and Inequality at the Rural Medieval Italian Sites of Villamagna and Pava , (2020)
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Economic access influences degenerative spine disease outcomes at rural Late Medieval Villamagna (Lazio,
IT ) , American Journal of Physical Anthropology (2020) - Bioarchaeological approaches to looting: A case study from Sudan , Journal of Archaeological Science Reports (2016)