Tiffiny Tung, Ph.D.
Tiffiny A. Tung is Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Ingram Chair in Anthropology, and Professor of Anthropology. She leads Vanderbilt鈥檚 academic enterprise across its eleven schools and colleges. Her leadership is defined by a commitment to rigorous and innovative scholarship and to cultivating students鈥� intellectual growth, both inside and beyond the classroom. This approach ensures that Vanderbilt students graduate as independent and critical thinkers, thoughtful observers of the world, and knowledgeable and engaged citizens. She champions strong investment in research and creative expression across the full breadth of inquiry, from the arts, humanities, and social sciences to the natural and applied sciences. She has also served as Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education and Growth Initiatives, where she led the vision and full implementation of Immersion Vanderbilt, expanded undergraduate research opportunities, and deepened the intellectual vitality of undergraduate life. She leads the vision and implementation of academic programming for Vanderbilt鈥檚 New York City campus and is now extending those opportunities and developing the new connected campuses in San Francisco and West Palm Beach.
Tung is an anthropological bioarchaeologist who explores how society structured health outcomes for populations in the past. In particular, she examines how past instances of state power and imperialism impacted people and their communities. She evaluates these topics by analyzing mummies and skeletons from archaeological contexts, primarily in the Peruvian Andes, to investigate how imperial policies and practices structured health status, diet, exposure to violence, and lived experience of ruling and subject peoples.
She is also the Director of the Bioarchaeology and Stable Isotope Research Lab, where numerous undergraduate and PhD students have conducted research. She is the author of the book Violence, Ritual, and the Wari Empire聽(University Press of Florida, 2012) and has nearly 70 academic publications.