Charlotte Williams

Charlotte is a Ben Franklin, Presidential Endowment, and Sundry Gifts Graduate candidate pursuing a PhD in Anthropology, with a focus on cultural heritage and the history of archaeology. Her dissertation research investigates how American imperial projects ranging from the United Fruit Company to the Panama Canal used archaeology as a way to control Central American territory in the early 20th century, and seeks to show how both harvests and heritage were extracted using the same labor and infrastructural systems. Her research has been supported by the Smithsonian in Washington DC, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. For 2021-2022, Charlotte is a Just Futures Graduate Fellow for Penn's Mellon-funded multidisciplinary research group, Dispossessions in Latin America: The Extraction of Bodies, Land, and Heritage from La Conquista to the Present.