Magdalena Stawkowski

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.