My story & Insomnia Talk

I’m an anthropologist working with multimodal methods and specializing in insomnia.

My story

My dissertation research is an ethnographic study of insomnia in Belgrade, Serbia. I am particularly interested in the ways in which diverse encounters with sleeplessness map onto the broader experience of temporality in the midst of late-capitalism in Serbia. In my research the changing politics of sleep, and the experience of people caught amid these shifts serve as a prism for investigating the connection between the macro-processes of economic cum ethical change and subjectivity. As an award winning film-maker, I rely on my background in Visual Anthropology in creating multi-modal methodologies - sound, image and film - in both presenting my work and doing research. Insomnia talk is a space for me to organize many projects that grew out of my dissertation, and a space to keep you awake...

Education

PhD in Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh
2019 -

MA in Social Anthropology, WWU, Muenster, Germany
2018

MA in Visual Anthropology, University of Belgrade
2015

Anthropology and Humanism 2023

Platypus 2024

American Ethnologist Website 2024, 2022

Anthropology News 2023

Featured in

Weave

Freighted with brokenness and surrender, sleep is not a tool of resistance deployed in a conflict; it is the birth pangs of conflict’s transformation. It is the shadow of catastrophe, its doppelganger, without which it cannot recede.

Haytham El Wardany

Objects are death, all object, whether tidy (everything in order) or untidy (no one will find me in the pile). Furniture immobilizes – nothing can happen. When we walk in the midst of plants and animals we are moving among living things, we are part of them. When we are packed in the midst of objects, our surroundings are dead and we are a part of them, nailed down by inertness between the planks of insomnia.

Marie Darrieussecq

Insomnia is existence as indeterminate endurance.

Alphonso Lingis

Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.

Fernando Pessoa

Suddenly, I remembered a story of Slava David’s about a certain New York girl who had hysterically chased him out after passionate lovemaking, because, you see, she couldn’t sleep with men, wasn’t used to it. Love is love, but sleep must be sterile, deep, calm.

Edvard Limonov