Professor Douglas P. Fry chairs the Anthropology Department and also holds an affiliation at Åbo Akademi University in Finland. Fry is a passionate teacher, having won a teaching excellence award in 2005, and is known by his students for weaving anecdotes and human interest tidbits into his lectures and writings on war and peace. His popular course "The Power of Nonviolence" links human rights and civil rights. One of his current interests involves researching anthropological “peace systems” — clusters of neighboring societies that do not make war with one another. Fry regularly lectures on peacemaking in the United States and abroad. Fry believes that anthropology holds important current-day lessons: “The macroscopic perspective of anthropology, with its expansive time frame and culturally comparative orientation, provides unique insights into the nature of war and holds some concrete lessons for how to develop a more safe and peaceful world.” A recent essay published in Peace News elaborates on this theme.