Ieva Jusionyte

Ieva Jusionyte is the Watson Family Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. She is the author of the award-winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US–Mexico Border (University of California Press, 2018), which examines politics of injury and rescue in the militarized border region and offers a novel perspective for understanding state violence, border security, unauthorized migration, and public access to healthcare. 

At Radcliffe, Jusionyte will complete a book manuscript, provisionally titled “Exit Wounds: American Guns, Mexican Lives, and the Vicious Circle of Violence,” which takes a narrative approach to present the findings from a multisited ethnographic and archival research project following guns that cross the US–Mexico border. Braiding stories of people who live and work with guns on both sides of the border and either side of the law, the book traces the contours of impact that American weapons leave on Mexican society—its body politic as well as individual lives—and grapples with US complicity in violence south of the border.  

Jusionyte has received various grants and awards, including from the National Science Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. In addition to academic publications, Jusionyte has written about her research for the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, and the Los Angeles Times and discussed it broadly in the media, including the BBC and NPR. She earned a BA in political science from Vilnius University and her MA and PhD in anthropology from Brandeis University.