Graduate Student Profiles

Margie Serrato	mss@tamu.edu
Cultural Anthropology	ANTH 309I
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Margie began her studies at Texas A&M University under a Graduate Diversity Fellowship provided by the Office of Graduate Studies. This merit-based fellowship is awarded to students whose contribution and commitment to diversity is evident both inside and outside of the university. Part of her diversity-focused academic aims entailed pursuing, and being recently awarded, the Women’s Studies Graduate Certificate. Her dissertation project is about women in the U.S. military who have participated in combat in the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. She is interested in how these female soldiers relate to the violence of war, whether combat affected their roles as women, and whether they experience combat different from men. Additionally, she intends to evaluate how these female soldiers’ changed perceptions of womanhood integrate within the larger social context upon their return from the battlefield. Aside from her dissertation research, she has conducted two other studies. One of them was on female cadets in military academies in the U.S. (funded by the Department of Anthropology). The other was a cross-cultural comparison with female cadets in military academies in South Korea (funded by the National Science Foundation and the Korea Science and Engineering Foundation). Both of these studies were aimed to examine gender relations and gender discrimination within these institutions, and to understand the motivations for these females to join, and remain in, the academies. Margie’s broad research interests concerns gender issues. Over the course of her career she will continue exploring how women across the world deal with being the perpetrators and victims of violence, because it is an area of research that has been minimally addressed by anthropologists. As a feminist anthropologist, she intends to expand on issues of gender inequality in institutional settings. Additionally, she will continue studying the lives of women in non-traditional roles.

Currently Teaching (Fall - 2009)

Previously Taught