DePauw Stories

From her days as a DePauw sophomore to her work today as the Edward Myers Dolan professor of anthropology and chair of the Sociology and Anthropology Department, Angela Castaneda has come full circle.

“I’m a professor at DePauw because, when I was a student here, I had a professor, Andrew Williams, who was an anthropologist,” says Castaneda, who has taught at DePauw since 2004. When she walked into his introductory cultural anthropology class in 1996, she says, “I didn’t really know what anthropology was but fell in love with the class.”

After that first anthropology class, she decided it would be her major. By her senior year, Williams had encouraged her to apply to graduate school – something she had never considered.

“When I went to grad school, my goal was to eventually teach at a place like DePauw, where I could be an ‘Andrew Williams’ for someone,” she says. “He was so instrumental not only in the classroom, but as a mentor.

“So for me, it’s really been like a dream come true to be able to come back to the place that inspired me and to sit with students and do the types of things that Andrew did for me.”

The decision to attend DePauw wasn’t her own but Castaneda’s parents. She grew up in Northwest Indiana and spent her senior year of high school as an exchange student in Cali, Colombia.

“Because I was gone that year, I wasn’t able to tour college campuses,” she says. So, her parents did for her, and sent VHS tapes in the mail to her for her review. But in the end, it was her parents who chose DePauw.

“Since I had been away for a year they wanted me closer,” she say. “And so my first time to campus was the day I moved in.

“The campus is beautiful and, thanks to the professors that I had, I really enjoyed my time here.”

She hadn’t kept in touch with Williams until a couple years ago when she became chair of the department. “I reached out to him to share my news of being the first anthropologist to be chair of our department. I said, I can’t believe it, and his reaction was very sweet, very nice.”

Castaneda says her favorite class to teach is anthropology reproduction and childbirth. “It’s a smaller class, and we have really great, in-depth discussions. But at the same time, I also like teaching my intro class,” which she has taught every semester for 16 years.

“Some people ask, doesn’t it get old? Don’t you get tired of teaching that?” but Castaneda says that it doesn’t. “There’s something about exposing students to new ideas and thinking about the world in a new way that really energizes me.

“It’s wonderful for me to think about having these discussions about reproduction and birth culture at this stage in their lives where it seems very far off, if at all.”

As for her research, becoming a mother 11 years ago profoundly influenced it. “I started looking at motherhood and reproduction and childbirth from a anthropological perspective, and thought there’s so much I could do with this.”

She’s trained as both a childbirth and a postpartum doula. She also teaches childbirth education classes in Spanish at the public library in Bloomington.

Castaneda did not grow up speaking Spanish, though her mother is from Mexico. “My mother and her siblings were of a generation that it wasn’t cool to speak Spanish, and they were punished at school if they did. So my mother never taught me the language.”

Her experience in Colombia enabled her “to reconnect with language, which allowed me to reconnect with my identity, my culture and my family in new ways,” she says. “So when I walked into Professor Williams’ class and thought about culture – this love that I have for my heritage, my culture and the importance of what culture and language is – I knew that’s what I wanted to be able to teach others.”