Cathy Small

Cathy A. Small (born 1949) is a cultural anthropologist and an emerita professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University. She specializes in culture change, migration, and transnational studies with an emphasis on East Asia and the Pacific. She attended Temple University, graduating with a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1987. Pacific Studies selected this book for scholarly review.

Small also created a virtual model of Polynesian society called TongaSim using C++.

Freshman Year After teaching for fifteen years, Small realized she no longer understood the behavior and attitude of her students. According to this theory, students self-select the people they want to associate with and plan their schedules around these friends. The students also spent a lot of time discussing bodily functions. Similar ethnographic studies of student life have precedents, the most well-known being by Michael Moffatt and the team of Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart. However, Small was the first anthropologist to use pseudonyms to protect her informants, while also raising the issue of secrecy and ethnographic ethics in the same book. Her inspiration for the book was her ten-year relationship with Ross Moore, a disabled Vietnam veteran who experienced homelessness. Moore is a co-author of the book. Pipeline NAU is a partnership between the university, Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Northern Arizona, and Flagstaff Unified School District No. 1. Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs (Cornell University Press, 1997) "Finding an Invisible History: A Computer Simulation Experiment in Virtual Polynesia." Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation vol. 2, no. 3 (October 31, 1999) TongaSim (built using C++). Voyages: From Tongan Villages to American Suburbs 2nd edition (Cornell University Press, 2011) The Man in the Dog Park: Coming Up Close to Homelessness. with Jason Kordosky and Ross Moore. Cornell University Press, 2020.

As Rebekah Nathan My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student (Cornell University Press, 2005)