Director of Undergraduate Studies, Anthropology; Professor, Anthropology
1085 S. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107
phone: 734.764.2333
hours: by appointment (made via email)
About
Alaina Lemon is a socio-cultural, linguistic, and historical anthropologist. She tracks debates about communication and contact as they relate to material struggles over political and social change, especially as they affect the people of Russia, where she did years of fieldwork, and the Romani diaspora.
Based on research on stages and on film sets, in markets and on the Metro, in kitchens and in front of television sets, her writing addresses divisions of phatic labor and of other communicative meta-labors; access to media infrastructures; ideologies of rupture and animation; affect/sentiment/emotion; and animal-human relations.
Books:
Between Two Fires 2000
Technologies for Intuition 2017
Films:
T’an Bakhtale!: Roma in Russia (1996)
Tremors (trailer) (filmed 2002-5, release date tbd)
UM Affiliations
- Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies
- Center for World Performance Studies
- Interdepartmental Program in Anthropology and History
Awards
- 2023 Visiting Scholar at L’Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris, France)
- 2019-24 University of Michigan Office of Research grant (support to edit the documentary film Tremors in collaboration with its subjects)
- 2010-11 University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities Fellowship
- 2008 LSA/OVPR Michigan Humanities Award
- 2002-3 International Research and Exchanges Long-Term Research Fellowship
- 2001 Wayne S. Vucinich BOOK PRIZE
- 2001 Heldt Book Prize
- 1996-99 Michigan Society of Fellows
