Lauren Woodard
Professional affiliation
Wilson Center Projects
"Migration, Race, and Belonging in Russia’s Far East"
Full Biography
Lauren Woodard is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. Her research focuses on migration, race and ethnicity, national identity, borders, and the state along the Russia-China border.
Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow and Vladivostok, her book project, The Violence of Inclusion: Transforming Migrants into Russian Compatriots, examines how officials and migrants negotiate Russia’s migration and diaspora policies on Russia’s border with China. Her research has been supported by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fellowship and Fulbright research grants to Russia and Kazakhstan and published in Cultural Anthropology and the Political and Legal Anthropology Review. She has also conducted research on international development and water politics in Central Asia.
Prior to joining Syracuse University, she was a postdoctoral associate in Russian, East European and Eurasian studies and a lecturer in anthropology at Yale University. Dr. Woodard earned a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019.
Previous Terms
Former Title VIII Summer Research Scholar, 2018