The Department is pleased to announce that Kisha Supernant has been awarded the Martha Cook Piper Research Prize. This annual award recognizes two UAlberta faculty members in the early stage of their careers who enjoy a reputation for original research and show outstanding promise as researchers.
Dr. Supernant joined the Department of Anthropology as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in July 2010, nine months before completing her PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2011. She received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor on July 1, 2017.
Dr. Supernant's areas of research include Indigenous archaeologies, spatial analysis using geographic information system (GIS) technology, and community-based collaborative research practice. Throughout her career, Professor Supernant has emphasized collaborative archaeology, working closely with Indigenous people in Canada to do research of relevance to living communities. She is currently the Director of the SSHRC-funded Exploring Metis Identity Through Archaeology (EMITA) project, where she works collaboratively with Metis community members and organizations to understand the Metis archaeological record in western Canada. Funded through a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2012) and a SSHRC Insight Grant (2015), this is the first-ever academic research project to focus on Metis archaeology in Canada. She is also a co-director of the SSHRC and NSF funded Prince Rupert Harbour project, a collaborative archaeological project with Tsimshian communities on the northern British Columbia coast.
In addition, Dr. Supernant was recently named as the 2018-2019 Research Fellow for the Rupertsland Centre for Metis Research. Through this fellowship and a Kule Insitutue Research Team grant, she is working with five other Metis scholars and the director of the Rupertsland Centre for Metis Research (RCMR), to develop a placed-based, multidisciplinary project at Lac Ste Anne, Alberta, where she will work with these scholars and her own family members explore the historical, sociocultural, political, material, socioeconomic, and religious lifeways of Metis at Lac Ste. Anne, centering Metis sovereignty and ways of knowing.
Dr. Supernant is an excellent young scholar with a well-developed research program. She excels at both undergraduate and graduate teaching, as demonstrated by her receiving the Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award (Early Career) and the Provost's Award for Early Achievement of Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and is regularly sought after as a mentor and supervisor.