Alex Bentley

Professor of Anthropology, University of Houston

From Aug 1, 2017: Professor and Chair of Anthropology, University of Tennessee

Research Associate, Hobby School of Public Affairs, University of Houston

External Faculty, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems

Interests: Culture evolution, computational social science, isotopic analysis of skeletal remains

Professor Alex Bentley
Anthropology Department
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37916

These are just a few of the people I work with

Damian Ruck is a PhD candidate at the University of Bristol in the Bristol Center for Complexity Sciences, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. His research involves using advanced computational and statistical methods to model recent changes in cultural values in many different countries worldwide using a large dataset of surveys.

Dr. Alberto Acerbi is now based in the Department of Industrial Engineer ing and Innovation Science of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Dr. Acerbi is a cognitive/evolutionary anthropologist using computational methods to study culture evolution in the 'big-data' era. See, for example:

Acerbi, A. & R.A. Bentley (2014). Biases in cultural transmission shape the turnover of popular traits. Evolution and Human Behavior 35: 228-236.

Acerbi, A., V. Lampos, P. Garnett & R.A. Bentley (2013) The expression of emotions in 20th century books. PLoS ONE 8(3): e59030.

Professor Mike O'Brien is now Provost at Texas A&M, San Antonio. Mike and I are working on a new book, in the same spirit as I'll Have What She's Having but about the future of culture evolution.

Dr. Philip Garnett, now a Lecturer in the Management School at York University, served as a post-doctoral researcher on the Leverhulme Tipping Points project at Durham Univeristy. Using methods from computer science and evolutionary simulation of biological systems, Dr. Garnett researches the dynamics of fashion trends, linguistic evolution and synchronised human behaviour. See, for example:

Garnett, P., S. Mollan & R.A. Bentley (2014) Complexity in history: modelling the organizational demography of the British banking sector. Business History, in press.

Bentley, R.A., P. Garnett, M.J. O’Brien & W.A Brock (2012). Word diffusion and climate science. PLoS ONE 7(11): e47966.

Dr. Charlotte King, now a postdoctoral researcher in Anatomy at Univerity of Otago, completed a PhD at Durahm University, using isotopic and geometric morphometric analysis of human skeletons to investigate migration and kinship in prehistoric Thailand. See, for example:

King, C.L., R.A. Bentley, N.G. Tayles, U. Strand-Viðarsdóttir; G.M Nowell & C.G. Macpherson (2013) Isotopic differences highlight migration and subsistence changes in Thailand. Journal of Archaeological Science 40:1681-8.

Cat Jarman is an AHRC-sponsored Ph.D. student in the Department of Archeology and Anthropology at Bristol University. Her PhD project investigates the identities of the Viking Age burials in the U.K. through isotope analyses of human skeletal remains.