Liam Frink joins the OPP Arctic Sciences Section as a Program Director in Arctic Social Science
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Liam Frink joins the OPP Arctic Sciences Section as a Program Director in Arctic Social Science
August 11, 2022
Dr. Liam Frink has joined the Arctic Sciences Section as an IPA Program Director in Arctic Social Science. Frink earned his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin in 2003 and is a professor in the department of anthropology at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Since 1995 he has focused on social science and humanities work in coastal western Alaska founded on long-term relationships built on community-based participatory research. A primary focus is to bridge and honor Indigenous and western ways of knowing and local science.
Frink’s interactive and collaborative field and lab-based research has focused on Alaska Native women’s subsistence technologies, processes, and expertise. In addition, Frink works with archival documents housed at the Jesuit Archives & Research Center in St. Louis focusing on early 1900s colonial residential schools. From his start as a graduate student Frink’s work has been supported by NSF with funding from SBE and OPP in addition to a Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-Doc Fellowship.
Along with three co-edited books, Frink published a 2016 monograph, A Tale of Three Villages: Indigenous-Colonial Engagements in Southwestern Alaska, 1740-1950 with University of Arizona Press, referred to by a reviewer as “one of the most significant in the literature of Arctic anthropology, archaeology, and ethnohistory.” His work has also featured in anthropology and archaeology flagship journals American Antiquity, American Anthropologist, Current Anthropology, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, and Journal of Archaeological Science. Frink has extensive scholarly professional service including co-creating and co-editing the international journal Ethnoarchaeology: Journal of Archaeological, Ethnographic and Experimental Studies and continues as co-creator and co-editor of the awarded University of Arizona Press book series Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in the Americas with 18 books.
Frink’s shared-governance commitment to advancing equity, inclusion, diversity, and social justice stems from his personal and professional location as a Transgender colleague, US Coast Guard veteran, transfer-student, Pell Grant recipient and faculty at UNLV, an R1 MSI, HSI, and AANAPISI land-grant (on Nuwu-Southern Paiute Lands) state public school. His enduring commitment to innovative, culturally competent, and collaborative action has been recognized by his campus and professional communities and he has served on the Society for American Archaeology Sexual Harassment Task Force and the Committee for the Status of Women in Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association Ethics Committee.
As the UNLV Provost Fellow, working with faculty and executive leadership across campus Frink founded the school’s first Faculty Mentoring Program featuring interdisciplinary senior-junior mentor teams and support programming for underrepresented faculty. He was also entrusted as the first UNLV Executive Director of Undergraduate Research to create and grow the UNLV Office of Undergraduate Research which alone in 2018 served over 3,300 undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, administrators, parents, and community and industry partners. A highlight of his leadership is the UNLV Summer Undergraduate Research Funding Initiative—raising $96,500 to foster and support student research.
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