Rebecca Bryant

Principal Investigator

I am a political anthropologist and historian and since 2017 am Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. I study the political wherever I find it, whether it’s in the institutions of states, aspirations for sovereignty, practices of bordering, or the lives of displaced peoples. Much of my work has focused on temporality and the future, as I see the promises and hopes attached to states and sovereignties as critical to understanding political lives.

My 2019 co-authored book, The Anthropology of the Future (with D. M. Knight), offered methodological suggestions for how anthropologists might study the future in the present. I am currently completing two book manuscripts that build on that work. The first, The Speculative State: Governance in a Time of Contingency, asks what the future of the State may be in the face of the multiple crises of late capitalism, climate apocalypse, and polarized politics, and whether the State as we have known it even has a future. The second, Geopolitical Intensities (co-authored with David Henig), is under contract with Cambridge University Press’s New Departures in Anthropology series. The book interrogates the geopolitical as an ethnographic object and charts new questions and methods for its study.

My historical and ethnographic research has concentrated on the Eastern Mediterranean, especially the divided island of Cyprus and Turkey. I’ve studied how Cypriots displaced over decades and young Syrian refugees living in Turkey plan their lives in conditions of uncertainty. These studies resulted in two book manuscripts: The Past in Pieces: Belonging in the New Cyprus (UPenn Press, 2010), and Lives in Limbo: Syrian Youth in Turkey (Berghahn, 2024), with Amal Abdalla, Maissam Nimer, and Ayşen Üstübici.

In subsequent work, I’ve asked how citizens of de facto states live without recognition and what their desires for sovereign agency tell us about similar desires in recognized states. This resulted in my co-authored book with Mete Hatay, Sovereignty Suspended: Building the So-Called State (UPenn Press, 2020) and a volume co-edited with Madeleine Reeves, The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination Beyond the State (Cornell, 2021). I have a longstanding interest in the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and its legacies in the Eastern Mediterranean present, and I edited a volume on this subject, Post-Ottoman Coexistence: Sharing Space in the Shadow of Conflict (Berghahn, 2016). Throughout my work, I’ve used this post-imperial space to challenge the hegemony of Western European colonialism in the study of empire. My current ERC research examines foreign infrastructural investment as a new form of imperialism that gestures towards former empires while constructing multipolar futures.

My background is in Philosophy (B.A.) and Cultural Anthropology (M.A., Ph.D.), both of which I studied at the University of Chicago. I have held teaching and research positions at the London School of Economics, George Mason University, and the American University in Cairo and have taught as a Fulbright Fellow at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and as a visiting professor at Middle East Technical University’s Cyprus campus. I have held affiliations as an Associate of the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a Professorial Research Fellow in the European Institute of the London School of Economics.

My work has been funded by four Fulbrights, two grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and grants and fellowships from the United States Institute of Peace, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education (U.S.), among others. In the U.K., I have received grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Economic and Social Research Council. In 2002-3, I was a Fellow of the Cornell University Society of Fellows, and in 2005-6 a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.