• Senior Executive Associate Dean
  • Professor of Anthropology

Administrative Contact

Emily Schultz

emily.schultz@tamu.edu

979-458-6970

Cynthia Werner

Biography

Dr. Cynthia A. Werner is a professor of anthropology and a longtime affiliate of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She serves as Senior Executive Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and previously was the Acting Executive Associate Dean (August 2023 to mid-February 2024) as well as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs (June 2022 to mid-February 2024). She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology. Dr. Werner joined the Texas A&M faculty in 2001 as a member of the Department of Anthropology, where she served as head from 2011 to 2019. She has been conducting ethnographic field research in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia for the past 30 years. Her research has focused on how relatively marginalized groups have been impacted by Soviet and post-Soviet state projects, including the Soviet emancipation of women, the Soviet nuclear testing program, the post-socialist economic transition and Kazakhstan’s ethnic repatriation program. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, National Research Council and American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a past president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (2012-14). Dr. Werner previously has served as the director of ADVANCE at Texas A&M (2019-2022), a period during which she shifted her research accordingly while coordinating two regular workshops aimed at ensuring fair and equitable review processes for faculty hiring and faculty promotion. She led an ADVANCE research project on the differential impacts of COVID-19 on Texas A&M scholars that led to university guidelines for conducting faculty evaluations within the context of the pandemic. In addition, she was involved in a collaborative, multidisciplinary research project examining forms of bias in the promotion and tenure review process.

Job Duties

  • Faculty Affairs and Undergraduate Academic Affairs

Educational Background

  • PhD, Indiana University, 1997

Research Interests

  • Since 2004, I have been conducting research on the transnational migration of Mongolia’s Kazakh population. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Mongolia’s Kazakh population started to migrate to the newly independent Republic of Kazakhstan, a location that is newly imagined as their homeland. This is a collaborative project with Holly Barcus, a geographer at Macalester College. We are interested in the factors that shape individual and family decisions to migrate or stay in place. We are also interested in how gender shapes migration decisions and migration impacts, and the role that kin-based social networks play in helping to maintain transnational networks and social identities.

    Since 2001, I have been conducting research on the legacy of nuclear testing in northeastern Kazakhstan. This is a collaborative project (with environmental chemist Kathleen Purvis-Roberts at the Claremont Colleges). After World War Two, the Soviet Union developed a major nuclear test site in northeastern Kazakhstan that served as the location for 116 above-ground tests and 340 underground tests between 1949 and 1989. Our project involves interviews and surveys with Kazakh and Russian villagers who live near the Polygon, health care workers in the region most affected by nuclear testing, and research scientists who work at the former test site. We are interested in how perceptions of risk vary across these groups. We are also interested in the politics of risk, as the victims of nuclear testing struggle to find justice in the form of compensation and quality health care.

Selected Publications

  • 2018 Cynthia Werner, Christopher Edling, Charles Becker, Elena Kim, Russell Kleinbach, Fatima Sartbay, and Woden Teachout. “Bride Kidnapping in Post-Soviet Eurasia: A Roundtable Discussion” Central Asian Survey 37(4):582-601.
  • 2017 Holly Barcus and Cynthia Werner. “Choosing to Stay: (Im)Mobility Decisions Among Mongolia’s Ethnic Kazakhs.” Globalizations 14(1):32-50.
  • 2015 Cynthia Werner and Holly Barcus. “The Unequal Burdens of Repatriation: A Gendered Analysis of the Transnational Migration of Mongolia’s Kazakh Population” American Anthropologist 117(2): 257-271.
  • 2015 Holly Barcus and Cynthia Werner. “Immobility and the Re-imaginings of Ethnic Identity among Mongolian Kazakhs in the 21st Century.” Geoforum 59: 119-128.
  • 2013 Cynthia Werner, Holly Barcus, and Namara Brede. “Discovering a Sense of Well-Being Through the Revival of Islam: Profiles of Kazakh Imams in Western Mongolia” Central Asian Survey 32(4): 527-541.