Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer is research professor in the Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Georgetown University, where she is also a faculty fellow at the Berkley Center. Balzer's research is in social theory, inter-ethnic relations, religion, the growth of nationalism, and anthropology of the Russian Federation. Her extensive fieldwork has focused on Siberia and Central Asia. She has taught at the Universities of Illinois and Pennsylvania and held post-doctoral fellowships at Harvard, Columbia, and the Woodrow Wilson Center's Kennan Institute. She is the author of Interrelating Politics, Ecology and Spirituality in Siberia’s Far East: Sakha, Buryatia and Tuva (2013), Shamans, Spirituality, and Cultural Revitalization: Explorations in Siberia and Beyond (2012), and The Tenacity of Ethnicity (1999). Balzer is also editor of the journal Anthropology and Archeology of Eurasia and the books Culture Incarnate: Native Anthropology from Russia; Shamanism: Soviet Studies of Traditional Religion in Siberia and Central Asia (1997); and Russian Traditional Culture: Religion, Gender and Customary Law (1992). She holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and M.A. and Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College.