Erin Riggs

Erin Riggs is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a joint appointment at the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. She serves as a contemporary and historical archaeologist with expertise in refugee resettlement, material culture studies, and South Asian archaeology. Riggs is also an active member of the CHAT (Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory) Standing Committee, contributing to scholarly discussions on archaeological practice and theory.

Dr. Riggs completed her PhD at Binghamton University in 2019 and has since established herself as a leading researcher in post-Partition archaeology in South Asia. Her research focuses on forced displacement in the recent past and material negotiations of national belonging, with particular attention to refugee resettlement in Delhi following the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. Through built landscape surveys, oral history collection, and archival research, she documents families' experiences within different types of resettlement spaces including evacuee properties and government-built colonies.

Her work challenges common assumptions about aid-dependency of the displaced and the mutability of national belonging, arguing for the disciplinary need to consider government systems as mechanisms of not only coercion, but collaboration and care. Riggs' publications examine oral histories as heritage futures, the role of jaali imagery in identity construction in urban post-Independence India, and the ideologies behind 20th century government employee housing colonies in Delhi. She is currently working on an edited volume titled Historical Archaeology in South Asia with Dr. Supriya Varma (JNU), which brings together perspectives from scholars across 9 countries.

Riggs teaches Historical Archaeology of the Americas (ANTH 106), Contemporary Archaeology (ANTH 456), Archaeology of South Asia (ANTH 221), and Heritage: Global Case Studies (ANTH 420). She actively mentors students interested in leveraging archaeological inquiry to critically consider experiential realities, disadvantaged communities, and the politics of material heritage. Her future research goals include documenting Partition resettlement patterns in Kolkata (East India), developing cross-cultural comparisons of migrant experiences, and initiating local projects in Illinois to engage students in historical archaeology.