School of Humanities and Sciences


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  • Danielle Raad

    Danielle Raad

    Curator and Assistant Director of Collections, Archaeology

    BioDr. Danielle Raad (she/her) is an anthropologist, archaeologist, educator, and museum professional with expertise in object-based teaching and research. She assumed leadership of the Stanford University Archaeology Collections in 2023 and oversees all aspects of operations, acquisitions, registration, collections management, education, research, and outreach as the Curator and Assistant Director of Collections.

    As a Postdoctoral Fellow in Academic Affairs at the Yale University Art Gallery, she expanded curricular and co-curricular engagement with the collections, leading over 50 university course visits and tours for students and staff in departments and programs across campus. She co-curated a photography installation and facilitated a range of object-based teaching workshops.

    Dr. Raad holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology with a certificate in Public History from UMass Amherst, an S.M. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an M.A. in Chemistry from Harvard University, and a B.Sc. in Chemistry from Brown University. While at UMass, she also earned a certificate in Public History with a focus in Museum Studies, completing internships in museum education, curation, and collections management.

    Her additional teaching credentials include an M.Ed. in Secondary Education from Lesley University and a Postdoctoral Certificate of College Teaching Preparation from Yale’s Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning. An experienced and award-winning educator, Dr. Raad has taught at the high school, community college, and university levels, been an academic advisor, and developed and published innovative curricula in archaeology and physics.

    Dr. Raad's research interests traverse humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines. She has analyzed the chemical signature of salt production ceramics, reconstructed lapidary technologies of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Levant, characterized the material and ideological manifestations of a WWII-era plane crash in Massachusetts, and investigated the relationship between historic plaster cast collections and modernist architecture.

    Her first book, Above the Oxbow: The Construction of Place on Mount Holyoke, currently under advance contract and review with West Virginia University Press, develops a framework for an “orogenic ethnography,” a contemporary archaeological ethnography of place-making on mountain landscapes. The book is a multi-stranded story of place attachment on Mount Holyoke, a mountain in Western Massachusetts, that considers community activism, the creation and propagation of historical narratives and visions of the landscape, and engagements with material culture and the more-than-human environment over two centuries.