Lecturer , Department of Social Anthropology, University of Manchester
Biography
Sonja Dobroski is a lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is a social anthropologist with an interdisciplinary background in material culture and Native American studies. In addition to her PhD, Sonja holds a master’s degree in American Indian studies from UCLA and a master’s degree in archaeology from the University of Oxford. Since 2010, she has been conducting ethnographic, oral historic, and archival fieldwork throughout the United States, paying specific attention to the role that material culture plays in settler colonial societies. Specifically, her research has examined how and why U.S. settlers use the material culture of Indigenous people(s) to create and maintain national identity. Currently, she is interested in how successive extraction events are historicized and affect perceptions of material culture and the landscape.
In addition to her anthropological work, Sonja has curated several exhibitions. Currently, she is lead curator on an exhibition titled, Carbon Afterlives: Coal Landscapes, Addiction, and the End of Mining in Scotland, an ESRC funded project on heroin use in Scotland.
