Rate My Professor Christina Torres

Christina Torres-Rouff is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Heritage Studies at the University of California, Merced, where she has been a faculty member since 2012. A bioarchaeologist, her research emphasizes contextualized bioarchaeology through the study of archaeological human remains and their mortuary contexts, primarily in northern Chile and the surrounding Atacama Desert regions. She investigates themes such as the production of social identity, the emergence of inequality, human dimensions of exchange and mobility, health indicators, violence, and deliberate cultural body alterations including cranial vault binding on children. Torres-Rouff's fieldwork and museum-based research combines skeletal analyses for pathology and trauma with regional environmental patterns, grave goods, isotopic studies, and markers of local or foreign affiliation to reconstruct past societal transformations and individual life histories. She teaches broadly in biological anthropology, including courses on the human skeleton and mortuary archaeology.

Torres-Rouff holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Barbara (2003), an M.A. in Anthropology from the same university (1998), and a B.A. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley (1996). Her scholarship is extensive, with 77 research items and over 2,115 citations documented on ResearchGate. Select key publications include "Migration and Paleomobility in the Face of Environmental Change and Political Collapse: Case Studies from San Pedro de Atacama, Northern Chile" (2023), "Living with Chronic Impairment: Tracing Care Using Changes in the Skeleton" (2023), "Emerging inequality in the San Pedro de Atacama oases (Chile): An investigation of entheseal patterns using ANCOVA and Factorial ANOVA" (2023), "A multiplicity of identities: The intersections of cranial vault modification, paleodiet, and sex in San Pedro de Atacama, Chile" (2022), "Twenty-first century bioarchaeology: Taking stock and moving forward" (2022), and "The Life and Death of a Child: Mortuary and Bodily Manifestations of Coast–Interior Interactions during the Late Formative Period (AD 100–400), Northern Chile" (2021). She has served as Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Heritage Studies and contributed to interdisciplinary humanities programs.