Anya Bernstein

Anya Bernstein is Assistant Professor at Harvard University. Her book, Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (Chicago 2013), focuses on the ways in which religion and politics have intersected under conditions of rapid social change in terms raised by recent work on sovereignty and postsocialism. Through her work in visual anthropology and as a documentary filmmaker, her current project deals with religion, secularism, and visual culture in contemporary Russia. As part of this project, her most recent research article that came out in Critical Inquiry examines the case of the Pussy Riot collective through the lens of gender and body politics.