Catherine Wanner

Catherine Wanner is a historical anthropologist and Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Penn State University. She earned a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology before embarking on over 30 years of ethnographic and archival research in Ukraine. She is the author or editor of seven books, including her most recent monograph, Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell, 2022) and editor of Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine (Routledge, 2024). The working title of her next book is Ecocide, Animals, and Empathy during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Her research has focused on the politics of religion in Ukraine and increasingly on human rights and conflict mediation within the context of war. She is the convenor of the Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. In 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity and in 2023 received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies.