Jennifer Wistrand is a Post-Doctoral Fellow with ISIM. She is also an Adjunct Professor for CERES where she is currently teaching “Political and Cultural Narratives of Central Asia” and has previously taught “Migrants and Displaced People in Eurasia.”

Jennifer is an anthropologist who is interested in academic and policy questions concerning migration and forced displacement in the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia. She recently had a chapter entitled “Social Consequences of Seasonal Labour Migration: A Case Study from Rural Azerbaijan” published in a book about post-Soviet migration and diasporas that was edited by Milana Nikolko and David Carment and published by Palgrave Macmillan. In 2017, Jennifer was a consultant to the World Bank for a project concerning internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Azerbaijan. Prior to that, she spent three years at the U.S. Department of State as a term appointee and a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow in the Secretary’s Office of Religion and Global Affairs, the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, and the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations.

Jennifer holds a Ph.D. and an MA in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA in anthropology and French from Northwestern University. She has been a Kennan Institute Title VIII Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Fulbright Fellow. She was also a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan.