Tracie Wilson

Tracie Wilson is a Research Associate at the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies within the Institute of History at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. She has been affiliated with the university since 2009, primarily contributing to the German Research Foundation (DFG) project Paths of Legal Reasoning in Ethnically and Religiously Mixed Communities. Her guest residency at Trier University (2021) facilitated research bridging Border Studies and more-than-human world theories.

Education includes:

• BA in Political Science from Truman State University (1989)
• MA in Russian and East European Studies from Indiana University-Bloomington (1996)
• PhD from Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (2005) with dissertation: Wild Nature: Globalization, Identity and the Performance of Polish Environmentalism

Research integrates ethnological, legal, and environmental frameworks with foci on:

• Transnational ethnography in European/North American contexts
• Intersection of gender, social movements, and legal anthropology
• Environmental discourse in post-socialist societies
• Historical welfare systems and anti-trafficking efforts in Galicia

Her publications demonstrate consistent thematic evolution from Polish environmentalism (2006) toward interdisciplinary legal-anthropological studies of Eastern Europe, increasingly incorporating gender perspectives and border theory. Current work examines more-than-human dimensions of border spaces.

Key project participation:

• DFG Project: Paths of Legal Reasoning in Ethnically and Religiously Mixed Communities: Experience Resources in Poland-Lithuania and Its Successor States (2009-present), investigating women's charity organizations and child trafficking prevention in early 20th-century Galicia.