Department of Anthropology

Elíza Frenkel is a Ph.D. student in Sociocultural Anthropology, minoring in Jewish Studies. Her dissertation focuses on the objects of refugee women during the ongoing full-scale invasion in Ukraine. She is also interested in the material culture of post-Soviet objects in migration and exile, the values that define the selection of belongings, and the translation of cultural forms of commemoration from Western to Eastern European contexts. She looks at her sites through the lenses of visual anthropology, climate justice, and ecological humanities. Her M.A thesis dealt with the commemoration of Soviet terror in Post-Soviet Russia, focusing on the case of the “Last Address” (последний адрес) project. In her previous projects, she examined Yad Vashem’s museum tour guiding narratives and “selfies” in Holocaust memorial sites in Poland and Belarus.