Florence C. and Robert H. Lister Fellowship


The 2025 Lister Fellowship application period is now open. Applications for the Lister Fellowship are due by July 1, 2025, and we will announce the recipient on or about September 1, 2025.

The purpose of the Lister Fellowship is to assist graduate students who show promise of making significant advances in archaeological knowledge of Indigenous cultures of the greater Southwest, including northern Mexico. The fellowship helps support the final stages of Ph.D. dissertation research and the actual writing of the dissertation.

The award for the Lister Fellowship is $10,000. The Fellow may spend funds at their discretion to defray educational costs related to their Ph.D. program and expenses related to dissertation research, including living expenses. The award is not renewable.

The broad eligibility requirements for the Lister Fellowship are in keeping with Florence and Bob’s wide range of interests in Southwest archaeology. The fellowship is open to students who have been admitted to a Ph.D. program at a recognized university in North America and who are engaged in dissertation research or writing. The design of the student’s project must produce a significant increase in knowledge about Indigenous cultures in the southwestern United States or northern Mexico. Data for the dissertation may be gathered through field archaeology or analyses of existing archaeological collections. The study may be focused on the pre-Hispanic and/or historic period; projects that consider the interaction of Indigenous and European-derived cultures are eligible. Relevant projects that depend primarily on ethnoarchaeology or paleoenvironmental studies are also considered.

The Lister Fellow recipient is required to present a colloquium on their research at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center during the fellowship period.

Florence C. and Robert H. Lister

The Florence C. and Robert H. Lister Fellowship commemorates the life and work of the late Florence C. Lister and Robert (Bob) H. Lister, noted archaeologists, historians, educators, writers, and administrators. Florence and Bob conducted much of their research in the southwestern United States and in northern and western Mexico. Over many decades, they made significant scholarly contributions to ancient and historic-period archaeology, to the history of archaeology, and to the study of pottery, including Indigenous and Spanish colonial ceramics.

Publications by Florence and Robert Lister can be found in this bibliography.

Lister Fellowship Recipients

Kelsey Hanson (2021)
Katie Richards (2019)
Benjamin Bellorado (2017)
Erin Baxter (2015)
Matthew Pailes (2013)
Alyson Thibodeau (2011)
Samuel Duwe (2009)
Scott G. Ortman (2007)
Diane Curewitz (2005)
Donna M. Glowacki (2003)
Wesley Bernardini (2001)
John Kantner (1997)
Ronald H. Towner (1995)
David R. Abbott (1993)

Matthew Pailes

2013 Lister Fellow

Matt’s research interests include developing economic and mathematical models that quantify the interactions between humans and their environment and that identify the emergent properties of the resulting interactions.

Alyson Thibodeau

2011 Lister Fellow

Alyson uses geochemical techniques to address archaeological questions in the Southwestern United States, Mexico, and Belize.

Katie Richards

2019 Lister Fellow

Katie’s research centers on the social and political organization of the Fremont people and the relationship between the Fremont and Pueblo cultures.

Diane Curewitz

2005 Lister Fellow

Diane examines the role that ritual may have played in pottery specialization and distribution during a critical period in Pueblo history.

David R. Abbott

1993 Lister Fellow

David studies Hohokam social organization based on patterns of ceramics exchange. Applications of the methodology show that hydraulic management had a pervasive influence on the organization of Hohokam social networks.

Erin Baxter

2015 Lister Fellow

Erin’s research interests include the interpretation of architecture, artifact, and mortuary data and how these analyses shed light on the development of social and political organization, with a focus on reconstructing the deep history of Pueblo society.

Donna Glowacki

Research Associate-LiDAR Group; 2003 Lister Fellow; 1994 Field Intern

Donna is an anthropological archaeologist studying transformation, disruption, and resiliency in Southwestern societies.

Ben Bellorado

Curator of Archaeology at the Arizona State Museum; 2017 Lister Fellow

Ben is an archaeologist with a keen interest in how textiles, textile imagery, tree-rings, and pottery reveal clues about social identities.

Wes Bernardini

2001 Lister Fellow; 1994 Field Intern

Wes’s research focuses on how inferences of human behavior are based on estimates of the scale of that behavior, including specifying the number of people and the amount of labor involved in particular activities.

Kelsey Hanson

2016 Field Intern; 2021 Lister Fellow

Kelsey studies prehistoric uses of both natural and constructed landscapes and the multiscalar nature of social and ritual practice.

Sam Duwe

2009 Lister Fellow

Sam studies the processes of coalescence that accompanied the formation of Tewa pueblos after A.D. 1150 in the Rio Grande drainage.

John Kantner

1997 Lister Fellow

John is interested in the interplay of cooperation and competition in human society, especially the role of these behaviors in the development of sociopolitical complexity and economic inequality, and in the application of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory to these problems.

Ronald H. Towner

1995 Lister Fellow

Ronald is interested in early historic period Navajo sites in the “Dinetah” homeland in northwestern New Mexico.