Anya Bernstein

About

Anya Bernstein is a Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University, affiliated with the Committee on the Study of Religion. She is based at the Barker Center, Suite 302 in Cambridge, MA. Her contact email is abernstein@fas.harvard.edu, and her phone number is 617-496-4987. She is involved in academic activities related to the study of religion, with a focus on anthropology, and is part of Harvard's broader academic community that includes the Harvard Divinity School, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations, and the Center for the Study of World Religions. Her work contributes to understanding religious phenomena through an anthropological lens, although specific research interests and key contributions are not detailed on this page.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Social Science
• Linguistics
• Philosophy
• Sociology
• Biology
• Veterinary medicine
• Zoology
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia

  2019-06-25 · 67 citations

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  A gripping account of the Russian visionaries who are pursuing human immortalityAs long as we have known death, we have dreamed of life without end. In The Future of Immortality, Anya Bernstein explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human.The Future of Immortality profiles a diverse cast of characters, from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neu…

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• Life, unlimited: Russian archives of the digital and the human

  Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute · 2019-09-22 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Since the end of the Soviet Union, questions of memory and history have been at the centre of public debates, often focused on the institutions of archives and libraries. This article considers a particular incarnation of arkhivnaia bolezn’ (archival disease, roughly archival fever) with genealogies going back to the pre‐revolutionary writings of the visionary nineteenth‐century philosopher‐librarian Nikolai Fedorov. Specifically, I examine practices among contemporary techno‐futurists…

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• The Future of Immortality

  Princeton University Press eBooks · 2019-05-08 · 10 citations

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• Legal Corpus Linguistics and the Half Empirical Attitude

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Legal writers have recently turned to corpus linguistics to interpret legal texts. Corpus linguistics, a social-science methodology, provides a sophisticated way to analyze large data sets of language use. Legal proponents have touted it as giving empirical grounding to claims about ordinary language, which pervade legal interpretation. But legal corpus linguistics cannot deliver on that promise because it ignores the crucial contexts in which legal language is produced, interpreted, and deploye…

  Publisher

• Pleistocene Park: Engineering Wilderness in a More-than-Human World

  Critical Inquiry · 2024-02-28 · 4 citations

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  Pleistocene Park is a large-scale science experiment in Arctic Siberia in the form of a future-oriented rewilding project with the goal of mitigating climate change. The park’s creators hypothesize that introducing large herbivores into the area will slow the thawing of permafrost. Using the approach of multispecies ethnography in attending to the nonhuman agencies at work in the project, I argue that the park differs from other rewilding projects, which are usually ecocentric, in emerging as a…

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Recent grants

• Emergent Forms of Expression in Postsocialist Contexts

  NSF · $184k · 2014–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Arieh L. Shalhav

  6 shared

• Sergey Shikanov

  5 shared

• Marcelo A. Orvieto

  5 shared

• D. А. Nikolaeva

  East Siberian Academy of Culture and Arts

  4 shared

• V. O. Key

  4 shared

• Gregory P. Zagaja

  University of Chicago

  4 shared

• Charles E. King

  Cornell University

  4 shared

• Michael J. Fischer

  Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Cancer Research

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Religious Studies

  Harvard University

  2005

• M.A., Religious Studies

  University of Chicago

  2000

• B.A., Religious Studies

  University of California, Berkeley

  1997

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• John Duffyh-103
• Shaye J.D. Cohenh-29
• Francis X. Clooneyh-19