Dr. Lauren Woodard is a political anthropologist with research interests in migration governance, national identity, diasporas, and borders. Dr. Woodard is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at the MacMillan Center at Yale University.
Trained as a cultural anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Dr. Woodard's research focuses on migration, race, and national identity in Russia. Based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted among government officials and immigrants in Russia, Dr. Woodard's current book project, The Politics of Return, examines tensions between exclusion and inclusion in Russia’s migration policies.
Dr. Woodard's research has been funded by the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Fulbright, the Social Science Research Council, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Dr. Woodard's work has been published in the Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR).
