The Center’s Director, Professor Ruth von Bernuth, will be on a faculty research and study assignment from July 1, 2017 through December 31, 2017. Michele Rivkin-Fish has kindly agreed to serve as Acting Director while Professor von Bernuth is on leave.
Michele Rivkin-Fish is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her research examines health and gender in Russia as arenas for understanding the broader social and political changes in that country since the end of state socialism. She has published articles on topics ranging from Russian reproductive and demographic politics, to doctor-patient relations, collective memory and notions of reparative justice in the aftermath of the Soviet Union. She is the author of Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Indiana UP 2005) and co-editor (with E. Trubina) of Dilemmas of Diversity After the Cold War: Analyses of “Cultural Difference” by US and Russia-Based Scholars and Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice: New Conversations Across the Disciplines (with M. Buchbinder and R. Walker). She began her ethnographic career with studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Israel with Soviet Jewish immigrants from 1988-89 and 1990-91. She is currently writing a book about the history of family planning from the late 1960s in the Soviet Union to the present in Russia.