University of Chicago: Department of Anthropology: About the Department

University of Chicago Anthropologists who work in Eastern Europe, Russia, Western & Central Asia

Faculty
Students:
     Preparing for the field
     In the field
     Writing up
     Recent PhDs

Faculty:

Susan Gal - Hungary, Austria
Paul Friedrich - Mexico (Tarascan linguistics); Kerala, India; Germany; Russia & the Caucasus
Adam Smith (A) - Armenia / Southern Transcaucasia; Velikent, Southern Daghestan, Russia

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Students:

Preparing for the Field

Hannah Chazin (A) - Eurasia, Andes (Archaeology of multiethnic communities, zooarchaeology, human remains)
Natalja Czarnecki - Rep. of Georgia, Poland (Mass mediation and media theory; language; marketing and advertising; "middle class," Soviet and post-Soviet economies of production and consumption)
Elizabeth Fagan (A) - Armenia, Greece, Asia Minor (Culture contact, imperial influences; architecture, building techniques; material culture; "Statements of Power in the Architecture and Epigraphy of Three Capitals in Armenia between ca 600 BC - 400 AD")
Kathryn Franklin (A) - Caucasus, Eurasia, Asia Minor (Archaeology of long distance mobility, markets and trade routes; "Local Crossroads and Stoppng Places: A Scalar Approach to Trade and Mobility in the Archaeological Landscape of the Medieval Armenian Highlands)
Emma Hite (A) - Eurasian Steppe, Mongolia (Bronze and Iron Age; ritual and symbolic behaviors in nomadic mortuary contexts; human and faunal remains)
K. Bryce Lowry (A) - Eurasian Steppe, Mongolia (Space, landscape, zooarchaeology, lithic analysis, GIS)
Erin Pappas - Russia, Ukraine, Crimea (Socialisms and sexualities; normativity and pathology; identities and geographies; language, gender and indexicality; Emergence of Gay Pride parades in East Europe and the planning process emanating from Western Europe)
Nelly Samoukova - Russia (Medical anthropology; anthropology of the body, theories of the senses, science and knowledge production, Soviet history, post-socialist subjectivities; "The Post-Soviet Body in Crisis: Healing and Medicine in Contemporary Russia")
Christopher Sheklian - Armenia (The confluence of religious, ethnic, and national identities; law and citizenship; nationalism; agency; secularism; diaspora; visual anthropology)
Benjamin White - Albania (Balkans, post-socialist Europe, temporality and semiosis; forms of incorporation: sovereignty, agency, and accountability. "Discursive Traditions, the Politics of Development and the State in 'Illegal' Housing Settlements Outside of Tirana, Albania")

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In the Field

Joseph Grim Feinberg - Eastern Slovakia/Central & Eastern Europe; "Valleys of Hunger, Cities of Shine: An Investigation into the Possibility of Folklore and Democracy in Czecho-Slovakia at the 'End of History'"
Owen Kohl - Croatia; Southeast Europe; former Yugoslavia (Ethnmusicology, media, ethnographic film, youth culture, hip hop studies; " 'People, the Balkans were Built for Rap': Hip Hop in Regional and Global Context")
Tatiana Tchoudakova - Ulan-Ude, Buryatia, Russia (Medical anthropology, Russian healthcare system, Buryat medical practices/Tibetan medicine; conceptions of the body and health, death and dying; linguistic anthropology, language and ethnicity; "Biocosmopolitan Flows and Non-Exportable Experts: Institutionalizing Tibetan Medicine in Russia")

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Writing Up

Andrew Graan - Skopje, Macedonia; "Watching the World Watch: News Media and the Everyday Politics of International Oversight in Post-Conflict Macedonia"
Alan Greene (A) - Caucasus, Asia Minor, Eurasia; "The Social Lives of Pottery in the Plain of Flowers: An Archaeology of Ceramic Production and Exchange in the Late Bronze Age Tsaghkahovit Plain, Armenia"
Mary Fran Heinsch (A) - Dagestan & Azerbaijan; "The Materiality of Mobility: Rethinking Migration as Explanation in the Kura-Araxes Period [Eastern Caucasus]"
Stephen Hibbard (Ling) - Chocholow, Poland; "Iconic Communities: Linguistic Practice, Cultural Performance, and Ideologies of Nationhood in the Polish Highlands"
Brian Horne - Russia; Mass media, aesthetics, audio technology, music; " 'Save Our Souls': Russian Bards and the 'Sound' of State Transformation"
Larisa Jasarevic - Bosnia; "The Intimate Debt: Health, Wealth and Surviving the Postsocialist Bosnian Market"
Maureen Marshall (A) - Caucasus, Southwest Asia; "Burials and Bodies: A Bioarchaeological Investigation of Mortuary Practices in Late Bronze Age (1500-800 BC) Armenia"
Marina Mikhaylova - Vilnius, Lithuania/Western Russia; "Nation-State and the Politics of Youth in Contemporary Lithuania"

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Recent PhDs

David Altshuler - Olomouc, Czech Republic; "Anchors of Identity: Property, Morality and Difference in Czech Society"
Gretchen Bakke - Lubljana, Slovenia; "Contemporary Slovene Art and Artifice"
Keith Brown - Skopje & Krushevo, Macedonia; "Of Meanings and Memories: The National Imagination in Macedonia"
Krisztina Fehervary - Dunaujvaros & Budapest, Hungary; "In Search of the Normal: Material Culture and Middle-Class Fashioning in a Hungarian Steel Town, 1950-1997"
Clementine Creuziger Fujimura - Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Russia; "Childhood in Russia: Representation and Reality"

Andrew Gilbert - Prijedor, Bosnia-Herzegovina; "State-Making/State-Breaking: Returning Refugees, NGOs, and the Political Geography of Bosnia/Herzegovina"

Jessica Greenberg - Belgrade, Novi Sad & Nis, Serbia; "Citizen Youth: Student Organizations and the Making of Democracy in Post-Socialist Serbia"
Alaina Lemon - Moscow, Russia; "Indic Diaspora, Soviet History, Russian Home: Political Performances and Sincere Ironies in Romani (Gypsy) Cultures"
Dale Pesmen - Omsk, Siberia; "The Russian Soul: Ethnography & Metaphysics"
David Peterson (A) - Samara, Russia; "Changing Technologies and Transformation of Value in the Eurasian Steppes and Caucasus, ca 3500-1000 BC"
Laura Popova (A) - Samara, Russia; "Political Pastures: Navigating the Steppe in the Middle Volga Region (Russia) During the Bronze Age"
Stephanie Platz - Yerevan, Armenia; "Pasts and Futures: Space, History and Armenian Identity 1988-1994"
Justine Buck Quijada - Buryatia/Irkutsk, S. Siberia; "Opening the Roads: History and Religious Practice in Post-Soviet Buryatia"
Jennifer Rayport Rabodzeenko - St. Petersburg, Russia; "Creating Elsewhere, Being Other: The Imagined Spaces & Selves of St. Petersburg"
Brian Schwegler - Kamarno, Slovakia; " ‘Confronting the Devil': Europe, Nationalism, and Municipal Governance in Slovakia"
Elizabeth Vann - Opole County [Silesia], Poland; "Language, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the German-Polish Borderland"
Marko Zivkovic - Belgrade, Serbia; "Stories Serbs Tell Themselves (and Others) About Themselves: Discourses on Identity and Destiny in Serbia since the mid-1980s"

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