Katherine A. Dettwyler

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Katherine A. Dettwyler

7 Published BooksKatherine A. Dettwyler

She is the author of Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa, and the co-editor of Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives, which includes her own two chapters "Beauty and the Breast: The Cultural Context of Breastfeeding in the United States," and "A Time to Wean: The Hominid Blueprint for a Natural Age of Weaning in Modern Human Populations." In 2003 she co-edited an anthropology reader with Vaughn Bryant, titled Reflections on Anthropology: A Four-Field Reader. Initial results of her research on extended breastfeeding in the United States were published in Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology, Volume 47, Number 3, pp. 712-723 ("When to Wean: Biological Versus Cultural Perspectives"). She is the author of many other scholarly articles. She is a frequent speaker at universities, La Leche League conferences, and lactation consultant conferences. She lives in Delaware with her husband Steven, her sons Peter (22) and Alexander (16), Truman the standard poodle, and four cats. Her daughter Miranda (who was breastfed until she was 4 years of age) completed her Master's degree in gravitational physics at the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2004. Miranda and Mark Douglas Hannam, Ph.D., of New Zealand, were married on June 11, 2005 in Newark, DE. They spent 2.5 years in in Jena, Germany, during which time Miranda became fluent in German and became a mommy to Henry Graham Hannam, born July 3, 2006. In March of 2008, the moved to Cork, Ireland. At 20 months, Henry is a healthy and happy breastfed toddler.