Guest Speaker Meet and Greet | Magdalena E. Stawkowski

Magdalena Stawkowski is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of South Carolina. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2014 and has held roles at the Danish Institute for International Studies; the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, as a MacArthur and Stanton Nuclear Security Fellow.

Specializing in cultural and medical anthropology, Stawkowski focuses on militarized and nuclear spaces, the political economy of health, and the socio-cultural legacies of Soviet era nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, where she has conducted more than a decade of fieldwork. Her recent book, Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan, examines how communities near the former Semipalatinsk Test Site navigate contaminated landscapes.

Her work has been recognized with the Anthropological Responses to Health Emergencies Policy Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology. She has collaborated on international projects examining Cold War radioactive legacies in Kazakhstan, the Marshall Islands and French Polynesia. Currently, she is engaged in collaborative and comparative research on tritium bioaccumulation and biomagnification in the Semipalatinsk Test Site region and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.