Dianna Shandy is a socio-cultural anthropologist with research interests in rapid social change, transnational migration, and conflict settings.  Her work engages questions related to forced migration; humanitarian (and human services) interventions; gender; and qualitative research methods.

She earned her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University.  She has done research on the Nuer diaspora from South Sudan, African immigrants in Ireland, and women and family in America.  A product of a liberal arts undergraduate education, she completed her B.S. in languages, with certificates in African Studies and Russian Areas Studies, at Georgetown University.  

She teaches courses on transnational migration, human rights and humanitarianism, Africa, social science research methodology, and cultural anthropology. 

Her books include: Glass Ceilings and 100-Hour Couples:  What the Opt-Out Phenomenon Can Teach Us About Work and Family (co-author with Karine Moe, University of Georgia Press, 2010);  Nuer-American Passages:  Globalizing Sudanese Migration (University Press of Florida, 2007) and a revised edition of The Cultural Experience:  Ethnography in Complex Society (with David McCurdy and James Spradley, Waveland 2005).  She has edited special volumes on global childhood and the state for Anthropological Quarterly (2008, with Julia Meredith Hess); religion and forced migration for the Journal of Refugee Studies (Oxford 2002), and Rethinking Refuge and Displacement, for the American Anthropological Association (2000) (both with Elzbieta M. Gozdziak). She has also edited a special issue of Practicing Anthropology (2008, with Jon Poehlman), "Extreme Makeover:  The Ethnographic Edition," on research methods in anthropology.  She has published in Anthropological Quarterly, International Migration, American Anthropologist, Forced Migration Review, Social Thought, General Anthropology, Refuge, Journal of Refugee Studies, Practicing Anthropology, and Family Medicine.

Currently she is writing about Darfur and the representation of violence in Africa.

Link to Twin Cities Africanists home page

Link to Refugees and Immigrants in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN