Risa Cromer
Please join me in congratulating Risa Cromer, assistant professor of anthropology, for winning a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
The fellowship supports “the publication of significant works that promise to make a solid contribution to the field and beyond.” It provides $40,000 of financial support to anthropologists who are in the early stages of their careers to allow for 12 months of continuous, full-time writing.
Risa will use the fellowship next year to complete her book, Ex Utero: Frozen Embryo Politics in the United States. This book examines the afterlives of human embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures, over a million of which have accumulated in fertility clinic freezers across the United States. Based on 27 months of ethnographic research within programs that make and manage frozen embryos, this book offers an inside look at American answers to where frozen embryos belong. She argues that the figure of the ex utero embryo provides a novel focal point for revealing how racial capitalism, private property regimes, and white Christian nationalism co-operate within twenty-first century reproductive politics in the United States.
Congratulations, Dr. Cromer!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts