Dr. Larissa Petrillo
B.Sc. (Tor), MA (WLau), PhD (UBC)
Larissa Petrillo has been a faculty member in KPU’s Anthropology Department since 2008. She received her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia (2001) and worked extensively with interdisciplinary teaching teams at UBC before coming to KPU. She has worked with Native communities in both Canada and the United States and has published Being Lakota: Identity and Tradition on Pine Ridge Reservation (2007) with the University of Nebraska Press. The book was written in collaboration with a Native/Mexican couple, Melda and Lupe Trejo, and was completed after ten years of fieldwork in South Dakota. Larissa is passionate about social and cultural change, cross-cultural communication, research ethics, indigenous knowledge, and community-based conservation.
Larissa Petrillo serves as the KPU lead for the Carnegie Community Engagement pilot www.kpu.ca/carnegie. She is also currently the Fellow in Experiential Education and Community Engagement at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She has been steering experiential learning initiatives at KPU since 2013 and is the co-developer KPU’s experiential learning website www.kpu.ca/experiential. Larissa also serves as the Coordinator of KPU's Certificate in NGO and Nonprofit Studies which sees regular collaboration with nonprofit partners, preparing students for entry-level work in the nonprofit sector www.kpu.ca/ngo. These classroom activities inform her current publishing, with the recent publication of "Does size matter? In-library study of two Canadian public library branches," co-authored with John Shepherd and Alan Wilson.
Courses taught
- ANTH 1100: Social & Cultural Anthropology
- ANTH 2100: Methods and Ethics in Anthropology
- ANTH 2160: Culture and the Environment
- ANTH 2190: Non-Governmental Organization’s in Context
- ANTH 3160: Environmental Activism
- ANTH 3190: Non-Governmental Organization in Practice
- ANTH 4501: Contemporary Readings in Cultural Anthropology
Scholarly Work
- L. Petrillo. (2008) “Figuring it Out: Sundancing and Storytelling in the Lakota Tradition,” 91-111 in Religion and Healing in Native America. Suzanne J. Crawford, ed. Westport, CT: Praeger Press.
- L. Petrillo, in collaboration with Melda and Lupe Trejo. (2007) Being Lakota: Identity and Tradition on Pine Ridge Reservation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
- L. Petrillo. (2007) “Crazy Horse.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. 2nd ed. New York: Macmillan.
- L. Petrillo. (2002) “I Am Reading These Stories: Review Essay of Helen Hoy’s How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers in Canada” Essays on Canadian Writing 77:186-192.
- L. Petrillo. (2000) “Bleakness and Greatness in Ian Frazier’s On the Rez,” American Indian Quarterly 24(2):287-291.