Mai K. Alkhamissi is a second-year PhD student with an MA in Anthropology and Cultural Politics from Goldsmiths and a BA in Anthropology and Sociology from the American University in Cairo. Mai has done fieldwork in Cairo from 2011 to 2013 on a project called the Imagination of the Political researching independent trade unions and artists who…
Lucas is a PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Humanities (IHUM) working at the intersection of law, socioeconomic development, and the environment. His ethnographic research focuses on agribusiness and new settler colonialism in the Brazilian Amazon region. He holds an LL.B. from Federal University of Paraná (Brazil), an LL…
Kymberley Chu is broadly interested in research areas such as animal geographies, anthropology of capitalism, critical animal studies, debt, feminist/queer STS, and multispecies entanglements. For now, her doctoral research looks at how scientific and farmed animals are commodified in political economy. By tracing zoonoses geographically…
Tae is interested in the continuous interplay between the environment and its inhabitants,contemporary post-disaster experiences, and creativity, both as a subject and as a method of research. Her MA fieldwork focused on how a group of residents from Arahama (north-eastern Japan) reimagined their relationship with the post-tsunami…
Max A. Cohen is a PhD candidate in Anthropology who studies cultures and politics of the technology economy in the U.S. today. His dissertation, Subgoliath: Venture Capital & the Hunt for Baby Unicorns at the Technological Frontier, newly situates the U.S. startup economy within its ultra-high-risk…
Noah’s (White Mountain Apache Tribe/Cherokee Nation) research interests broadly concern Indigenous health disparities. He has worked extensively in genomics, bioethics, and community based participatory research in multiple domestic and international Indigenous peoples groups. His most recent research has been to identify…
Ipsita Dey received her BS in Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2017. While an undergraduate, Dey also minored in Anthropology and conducted extensive ethnographic work for her Departmental Honors thesis. She studied the post-traumatic process of psychological recovery and…
Alex’s research intentions focus on the tracing of plastic in and through the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, and how those people that live on the islands seek to develop ways of living without plastic. Through this research, he hopes to develop an understanding of what environmentalities exist within the Galapagos, of how ocean currents and…
Wei Gan comes to Princeton with a B.A. in cultural anthropology from Duke University, for which she completed an ethnography of conspiracy theorists in Texas. After spending some years bartending and running a vegan ice cream company in New York City, she is now a second-year PhD student working on a project related to Chinese and Chinese…
Thalia Gigerenzer is interested in the anthropology of anxiety, moods, wonder, embodiment and intimacy. Her research focuses on changing idioms of stress and well-being in India. Specifically, she is interested in how working-class residents of Delhi articulate their interior lives and re-imagine intimate relations in times of economic and…
Amadeus Harte is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of psychological and neuroanthropology, investigating the experience of participants in clinical trials for psychedelics to treat trauma, depression, and addiction. Inside the clinic and the lab, she’s interested in how psychiatry and neuroscience…
Max Horder is a cognitive anthropologist working on issues of belief, trust, and identity in modern Europe. His research broadly focuses on how individuals make sense of sociocultural change, particularly in terms of myth and the sacred. His ethnographic project concentrates on Britain’s decision to leave the European Union…
Hazal Hürman received her BA in Political Science and International Relations from Marmara University, Istanbul. She earned her MA in Political Science from Central European University, Budapest and MS in Sociology from Texas A&M University. Hazal’s research interests are situated at the crossroads of legal anthropology, political violence,…
JahAsia Jacobs is broadly invested in questions of student loan debt, Blackness, gender, as well as historical and contemporary labor in the United States. Her research asks how Black Americans are entangled in relationships of obligation at interpersonal and structural levels, and how feeling and religion mediate the ways Black women engage…
Luke Johnson is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary humanities (IHUM) at Princeton University. His dissertation explores the social, political, and ethical dimensions of interracial erotics in Paris, France. Luke's research interests include psychological and linguistic anthropology, psychoanalysis, fantasy, race,…
Kamal Kariem’s primary research interests lie at the intersections of indigeneity, protected areas, Russia, and post-Socialism. He investigates environmental governance through the lens of conservation projects in the Russian Far East (RFE) particularly in Primorskii Krai. In this vein, Kamal grapples with the ways that conservation projects do…
Navjit Kaur is a doctoral candidate in socio-cultural anthropology and Inter Disciplinary Program in the Humanities. Her dissertation research examines the forms and futures of savings that co-exist- often in contradiction- with the contemporary forms of banking and financial practices in India. Foregrounding, the ‘womanly face of savings’ the…
Aleksandar Kostić studies environmentalist activism and the state in Kyrgyzstan. He is looking at a network of environmentalist organizations operating in the western part of Kyrgyzstan. On the one hand, Aleksandar hopes to learn more about how these activists became interested in trying to end certain practices that some of them used to engage…
Sarah-Jane Koulen studies the turn to international criminal prosecution for violations of specific human rights violations and the bureaucratic transnational forms this new field of practice has produced, from courts and tribunals, NGOs and civil society organizations to independent evidence collectors and forensic training institutes. Sarah…
Nicolás’ research interests focus on the affective and ethical dimensions of violence, on the one hand, and the moral and political government of the latter, on the other. His previous research, The Moral Composition of Punishment. An Ethnography of the Carceral Condition in Rapa Nui, inquires about the forms and possibilities…
Cate Morley is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). Her research concerns forced disappearance and humanitarian forensic intervention, and is shaped, in particular, by attention to the various imaginaries—theological, ecological, political…
Moad works on ‘continuity’ and how it can be claimed and constituted across the region of North and Sub-Saharan Africa. Focussing on the performative moment of articulation and its acoustic dimension, he is interested in investigating the different methodologies employed to demand economic privilege and political participation contra the…
Yanping Ni is a first-year doctoral student. Her research interests focus on medical and environmental issues in contemporary China, particularly in relation to political economy and social inequality. She recently completed a thesis on pneumoconiosis (aka black lung), a disease that has sickened the largest number of workers since the 1980s in…
Nikhil Pandhi is a doctoral candidate in medical and cultural anthropology at Princeton who broadly researches the entanglements between caste, class, community medicine and healthcare in urban India. His current project tentatively titled How Does Caste Make Us Sick? Chronicles of Injury, Endurance, Chronicity and…
Sofia Pinedo-Padoch is a student currently completing her dissertation fieldwork. In 2017, she was awarded a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant from the National Science Foundation for her dissertation project, “Processes of State Administration in Caring for the Isolated Deceased.” Her research looks at how…
Vinicius is interested in inquiring about the role of uncertainty and the distinct perceptions of time in people's lives, chiefly during crises and disasters. He wishes to understand how critical moments shift the perception of past, present and future, creating new temporalities that combine memories and horizons, ruins and legacies,…
Michelle Rodriguez is a doctoral student, certified birth worker and community organizer. Her research explores the narratives of BIPOC birthworkers and birthing people navigating Western Medical systems. At Princeton University she is studying to center these alternative birth stories while analyzing the intersections of race, gender and…
Darius Sadighi earned his BA in music composition and sound studies from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and an MA in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He is interested primarily in healthcare, the startup sector, computational capitalism, and media. Currently, he is researching the emergent digital healthcare industry…
EB’s research interests include the politics and practices of mental health care, American health and insurance policy, adolescence, archives and paperwork, experts and expertise, privatization, and emotional labor. Her current work investigates the rising rate of young people in out-of-home care in Kentucky from the perspectives of young…
Aderayo Sanusi is a first-year PhD student. She was born in Lagos, Nigeria and lived there for ten years before immigrating to the United States with her family. She graduated magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa in 2012 from the University of Pittsburgh with a B.A. in Anthropology and English Writing. She subsequently received an LL.M…
Alexandra D Sastrawati is a doctoral student in cultural anthropology who broadly researches global mental health and arts activism in the Asia Pacific region (particularly Singapore and Japan). Prior to starting her graduate studies, she was a research executive at a non-profit organization and has worked on various government-funded research…
Fatima Siwaju is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University, with a graduate certificate in African American Studies. Her research and teaching interests center on Islam in the Americas, race and religion in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Afro-American…
Jagat Sohail is a PhD student at the department of Anthropology. His current research work is on Syrian Refugees in Germany, and is concerned with the way in which political categories of nation, religion, class and gender are mobilized in the constructions of narratives about displacement and xenophobia in Germany. He completed his masters in…
Alisa’s research interests focus on the production of resilience in the civilian communities in the war zone in Eastern Ukraine. She seeks to investigate the specifics of everyday life in the environment of military conflict and adjustments and coping mechanisms employed by its residents in order to recreate the normality of their livelihoods…
Serena’s research draws together environmental anthropology; global and feminist science studies; history of capitalism in Africa; gender and queer theory in Africa, and critical studies of global health and development. Her dissertation, tentatively entitled Kindred Frontiers: South…
Aaron is a PhD candidate in Anthropology with additional certificates in the History of Science & Gender and Sexuality Studies. His dissertation traces how experimental design movements—calling for the participation of elderly, rural, Indigenous, and otherwise marginalized communities in the making of new technologies…
Junbin Tan's research interests lie at the intersection of studies of religious affects, political subjectivities, temporality, and generational life. His dissertation Moving Gods, Moving Times: Cosmological Anxieties at Taiwan’s Border with China is based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork on…
Ayluonne is interested in the nexus of temporality, political emotions, and the urban material landscape, as components of city planning. She is a first-year PhD student and comes to Princeton by way of Columbia University, where she graduated with a B.A. in Anthropology in 2017. She is energized by the challenge of researching urban built…
Brian Yuan received his BA from Sarah Lawrence College, with concentrations in Cultural Anthropology and Early Modern History. His research interests sit at the point where governing, design, embodiment, aesthetics, and the senses meet in everyday technology and technological practices. He hopes to explore the fractures between designer and…
Christopher Zraunig is a fourth year PhD candidate working at the interface of medical anthropology, the anthropology of aging and care, queer theory, critical disability studies, and feminist studies of science and technology. His doctoral research project, titled “Queer Aging”, examines the possibilities and constraints…