“The Polygon is the only place on Earth where people actually live on a nuclear test site. Nowhere else in the world does this happen.”
—Dmitry Kalmykov, environmentalist

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I am a cultural anthropologist specializing in medical anthropology and currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina, where I teach both undergraduate and graduate courses. I was previously a Visiting Researcher at the Danish Institute of International Studies in Copenhagen. Before that, I held a dual appointment as a Fellow in the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and a Postdoctoral Teaching Scholar in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at North Carolina State University. Earlier, I completed two consecutive postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC): first as a Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow, then as a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow.

 

My research explores Cold War nuclear legacies in Kazakhstan, focusing on how shifting visions of militarized and nuclear landscapes shape forms of social, political, and economic exclusion among those living in and around the former Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site—known in Russian as the Polygon.

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I first traveled to Kazakhstan in 2007 while conducting research on the descendants of Polish families deported to the region during Stalin's regime and World War II. Nearly 60,000 self-identified Poles—the children and grandchildren of Soviet-era deportees—still live in Kazakhstan, many of whom seek repatriation despite limited support from the Polish government. During that fieldwork, I learned about the Polygon and the people who still inhabit this region. This chance discovery coincided with my growing interest in nuclear legacies—an interest shaped by my family’s experience of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster. Several of my relatives were living in Poland at the time and later associated various health issues with radiation exposure.

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This personal and academic convergence led me to ask: Who stays in a place marked as dangerous by experts? Why do they remain? How do they understand health, risk, and survival in a radioactive landscape? I have spent more than a decade pursuing these questions through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, and my recently published book, Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan, explores these issues in depth.

 

I currently serve on the Board of Directors of the Karaganda EcoMuseum in Kazakhstan, an NGO focused on environmental justice and public health. In 2012, as a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder, I co-organized the “Human Survival in a New Nuclear Age” initiative at the Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences (CARTSS). This initiative brought together social scientists, natural scientists, and community members to collectively engage with the human and ecological consequences of the nuclear age. I earned my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014.

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Outside of work, I enjoy hiking, skiing, soaking in hot springs, and road-tripping through Kazakhstan—often accompanied by my two small dogs.