Sarah Mellman

Sarah Mellman earned her M.A. in Latin American Studies in May 2017. After completing her M.A. program, Sarah enrolled in the doctoral program in Anthropology at Tulane.  She is also a 2012 graduate of The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where she earned her B.A. in Latin American Studies with a minor in Sociology.

During the calendar year of 2011, Sarah directly enrolled in the Social Sciences program at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil and became TEFL certified through a one-month intensive course in Rio de Janeiro. She also completed a two-month internship in the rural indigenous community of Las Salinas de Nagualapa in Rivas, Nicaragua through the Foundation for Sustainable Development and the Global Engagement Summer Institute at Northwestern University (2010). Sarah has founded and volunteered with education and sustainable development programs in Nicaragua, Argentina and Brazil, and she has worked as a freelance Portuguese, Spanish and English translator for 4 years.

In 2013 and 2014, Sarah was awarded two Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship grants for Brazil, where she taught college-level English language and American culture classes at the Federal University of Pará (2013) and at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2014). During her second Fulbright year, she also served as a mentor to eleven first-year grantees in the southern region of Brazil.

At Tulane, Sarah has focused her research on indigenous ethnobotany, historical ecology, linguistic anthropology and bilingual intercultural education in the Brazilian Amazon.