Catherine Wanner

Catherine Wanner is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. She holds affiliations with the Rock Ethics Institute and the School of International Affairs. Her research focuses on the politics of religion, conflict mediation, and historical memory in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine. Wanner earned her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University (1996) and has held visiting positions at Humboldt University (2016–17) and as a Fulbright Scholar at Ukrainian Catholic University (2019–20).

Her notable works include Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (2022) and the edited volume Dispossession: Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War against Ukraine (2023). Her research has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, National Science Foundation, and Swiss National Science Foundation. She currently leads the Working Group on Lived Religion in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

Wanner’s awards include the 2023 Outstanding Achievement Award from the Association of Women in Slavic Studies and the 2020 Distinguished Scholar Prize from the Association for the Study of Eastern Christianity. Her recent work explores empathy’s role in wartime Ukraine and the intersection of ecology and conflict through a project titled Ecocide and War: Animals, Empathy, and the Law After the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.