Catherine Wanner

Catherine Wanner is the Professor of History, Cultural Anthropology, and Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. She received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from Columbia University. She is the author of Burden of Dreams  History and Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine (1998); Communities of the Converted:  Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (2007), which won four book prizes and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title; Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (2022), which won two book prizes; co-editor of Religion, Morality and Community in Post-Soviet Societies (2008); editor of State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (2012); co-editor of Antropolohiia Relihii:  Porivnial’ni Studii vid Prikarpattia do Kavkazu. [The Anthropology of Religion: Comparative Studies from the Carpathians to the Caucasus] (2019); editor of Dispossession: Anthropological Approaches to Russia’s War Against Ukraine (2024); and editor of three collections of essays on religion and resistance during the Maidan protests. She is currently writing a book on ecocide after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Her research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council among others. In 2016-17 she was a visiting professor at the Institute of European Ethnology of Humboldt University and in 2019-20 she was a Fulbright Scholar at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, Ukraine. In 2020 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity and in 2023 won the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies. In 2023-24, she will be the Petro Jacyk Distinguished Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and a short-term research scholar at the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars.