Professor, Anthropology; Director of Undergraduate Studies, Anthropology
1085 S. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107
hours: by appointment (made via email)
About
Alaina Lemon is a socio-cultural, linguistic, and historical anthropologist. Her publications and film work, based on field and archival research in Russia and the Romani diaspora, contrasts interactions in stage rehearsals, acting classes, sound studios, and film sets with encounters in the markets and on the Metro, at kitchen tables and around TVs. Much of this work focuses on divisions of access to communicative channels, and on the ways those divisions shape knowledge and authority. With a focus on struggles over meta-communicative expertise, and on fears and fantasies around the powers of communication to traverse social, temporal and spatial distances, her research traces seemingly minor threads of interaction through institutions and infrastructures and across borders.
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
