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Madeleine Reeves

Professor Madeleine Reeves is a social anthropologist with wide-ranging interests in borders, labour migration, sovereignty, time, and social reproduction. Since 2022 she serves as Professor in the Anthropology of Migration at the University of Oxford, having previously taught at the University of Manchester, the University of Cambridge, the American University in Central Asia and Batken State University. 

She has published extensively on social transformation in Central Asia most recently co-editing a major handbook on the anthropology of Central Asia (The Central Asian WorldRoutledge 2023, with Jeanne Féaux de la Croix). Her 2014 monograph, Border Work: Spatial Lives of the State in Rural Central Asia (Cornell 2014) won awards from five different professional associations, including the ASN Joseph Rothschild Prize, the BASEES Alec Nove Prize, and the Past Presidents’ Gold Book Award from the Association for Borderland Studies.

Madeleine is deeply committed to collaborative scholarship and mentorship, having served as a trainer and editor for the Aga Khan Humanities Project, a former editor of Central Asian Survey and a mentor for the Central Asian Faculty Development Programme of the Open Society Institute.  

During the Academic year 2023-24, she will be conducting research on involuntary childlessness in Kyrgyzstan as part of a Wellcome Trust Investigator Award on Reproductive Mobilities in Central Asia. She looks forward to collaborating with colleagues in UCA and beyond.