Lauren Malone is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology. Her involvement with WashU’s Office of Public Scholarship began as a member of the CREATES cohort in 2024. Here, she quickly grew passionate for the dynamic modes of making academic research accessible. Since then, she has joined the Office as a guest speaker for the Inaugural Public Scholarship Symposium and attended numerous workshops on public scholarship skill-building.
Currently, she is leading a project on how public scholarship takes form in her research field of African archaeology. Through this opportunity, she is meeting with leaders and community members in the movement towards accessible archaeological knowledge dissemination on local and global scales. Most recently, this has allowed her to build collaborative relationships with the National Museums of Kenya’s Department of Cultural Heritage, present on the importance of public scholarship at the Society of African Archaeologists Conference in Portugal, and create an international working-group on Public Scholarship in African archaeology.