Paige DeVos is a first-year PhD student in Anthropology (specializing in Archaeology) as well as a Graduate Fellow in the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity & Equity. She is interested studying the social, economic, and politic contexts of food production and procurement within historical West African kingdoms, with a particular focus on animal use through zooarchaeological and isotopic analysis. She plans to examine how the meaning of certain foods and food practices changed due to the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism, and she hopes to connect her research to a larger historiography of the African diaspora and the slave trade as well as studies of comparative colonialism. In this way, she wants her work to critically engage with the historical development of social inequities in West Africa to help contextualize their sustained existence in the present.