Personal website: www.rebeccabryant.org

Rebecca Bryant is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. She studied Cultural Anthropology at the University of Chicago and has since held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics, George Mason University, and the American University in Cairo. She has also taught as a Fulbright fellow at Bogaziçi University in Istanbul and as a visiting professor at Middle East Technical University's Cyprus campus. She holds affiliations as an Associate of the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a Research Fellow in the European Institute of the London School of Economics.

Bryant is an anthropologist of politics and law whose work has focused on ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconciliation, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line, as well as in Greece and Turkey. Her work has been funded by several Fulbrights, as well as grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education (U.S.), among others. In 2002-3, she was a Fellow of the Cornell University Society of Fellows, and in 2005-6 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Between 2012 and 2016, she was part of a Norwegian Research Council-funded project, “Imagined Sovereignties,” for which she conducted comparative ethnographic research on globalization and unrecognized states. That research resulted in three  book publications: Sovereignty Suspended: Building the So-Called State, co-authored with Mete Hatay (University of  Pennsylvania Press, 2020); a single-authored ethnography, Faking the State: On Pirates, Puppets, and Other Unbecoming Subjects, currently under revision for publication; and a co-edited volume (with Madeleine Reeves), The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination beyond the State (Cornell University Press, 2021). In March 2019 she also published The Anthropology of the Future (co-authored with Daniel Knight) in Cambridge University Press's New Departures in Anthropology series.

Expertise:

Forced migration in the eastern Mediterranean; ethnic conflict and displacement; borders and sovereignty; gender and the state; political culture in Southeast Europe; post-conflict reconciliation; unrecognized states; conflict and temporality.

Research

Bryant is co-Principal Investigator, with Ahmet Içduygu of Koç University, of the ongoing project, “Well-Being and Integration of Syrian Youth in Turkey,” funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the U.K. and the Turkish Research Council (TÜBITAK).

Bryant also participates in the consortium project, "Between Policy and Protection: How Refugees Understand Choice," funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung and Wellcome Trust and coordinated by the London School of Economics' Institute of Global Affairs.