Expertise

Geographical Areas of Specialization:

  • Central and Eastern Europe; the Former Soviet Union, especially Ukraine and Russia.

Research Interests:

  • postsocialist transformations; civil society and non-governmental organizations (NGOs); gender and women’s studies; medical anthropology; Chernobyl; disability studies; HIV and drug use; US-Soviet literary history and diplomacy; Kurt Vonnegut in the Soviet Union

I have been conducting anthropological research in Ukraine since 1995. My broad research interests have been to track the variable effects of socialist collapse on people’s lives, especially in terms of gender formations, health, social inequalities and social justice, and changing citizen-state relations. Areas of major inquiry have included the effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster on health and healing strategies, the symbolic fallout of Chernobyl, the role of women in Ukraine’s civil society, the Ukrainian disability rights movement, and service provision for people who use drugs and people living with HIV in Ukraine, especially women.

I am currently exploring two major research areas:

  1. Disability and inclusion in the Russian Federation.
  2. The resonance of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Research Interests:

  • postsocialist; transformations; civil society and non-governmental organiz:ations (NGOs); globalization; development; gender studies; medical anthropology; post-Chernobyl health and healing; folk medicine; disability studies

Expertise: Medicine

Past Affiliations
Communities
Biological Science, European Studies, Gender Studies, Russian, Anthropology
Degrees
PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Anthropology, 2002
MA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Anthropology, 1998
BA, Wake Forest University, Anthropology and Russian, 1993
Keywords
europe, eastern europe, central cultural or social anthropology medical anthropology spinal cord injury folk medicine women's health international health
Languages
English, Russian, Ukrainian
Associations
American Anthropological Association
American Association for Ukrainian Studies
American Ethnological Society
Association for Women in Slavic Studies
Phi Beta Kappa
Society for Medical Anthropology
Society for the Anthropology of Europe
SOYUZ, the Post-Communist Cultural Studies Interest Group