Alumni Spotlight Fall 2026

Magdalena E. Stawkowski (Anthropology, PhD 2014)

Magdalena Stawkowski studies how people make lives in poisoned landscapes. Her book Atomic Collective: Radioactive Life in Kazakhstan follows communities near the former Semipalatinsk Test Site as they build ordinary lives on contaminated ground. At the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, she studies tritium and the slow politics of environmental abandonment. Her new comparative project follows contaminated forests across several countries, where trees, soil, people, and radioactivity entangle over decades. These are forests shaped by layered histories of military violence, radioactive and otherwise.