Anthropologist with archaeological tendencies.

Dr. Elena Sesma is an assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Kentucky. She earned her PhD in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in and holds an MA in anthropology from UMass Amherst and a BA in Anthropology and Womens Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. Trained as a historical archaeologist, Dr. Sesma’s research blends ethnography and archaeology to understand the ways that living communities relate to and reinterpret historic spaces and materials today. She has expertise in community-based and engaged research, historical and contemporary archaeology, and critical heritage studies, using collaborative and feminist approaches and methodologies to critically analyze collective memory, landscape and place, and the historical roots of inequality. 

Dr. Sesma is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Material Memories: Archaeological Ethnography of Land and Belonging in the Bahamas, which focuses on a community-based project that brought collective memory and oral history of local descendants of a 19^th century Bahamian plantation, together with landscape survey and ethnographic understandings of life on the rural island in the past and present-day. At the University of Kentucky, Dr. Sesma has developed several projects exploring sites of slavery and the transition to freedom in the Bluegrass, and their contemporary legacies today. These include collections-based research, historic cemetery geophysical survey and documentation, and a new campus archaeology project that investigates transformation of Lexington’s urban, racialized space as the university expanded its footprint in the mid-twentieth century.