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

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 and African immigrants in Ireland.  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 general anthropology. 

Her books include: 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 a special volume on 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 American Anthropologist, Forced Migration Review, Social Thought, General Anthropology, Refuge, Journal of Refugee Studies, Practicing Anthropology, and Family Medicine.

Currently she is working of a book project with economics professor Karine Moe on college-educated women and work-life choices.

Link to Twin Cities Africanists home page

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