Elizabeth Dunn is Professor of Geography and Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Indiana University Bloomington, where she also holds the Jean Monnet Chair in Refugee & Migration Studies and serves as Founding Director of the Center for Refugee Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 1999, M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 1993, and B.A. in Anthropology and Chinese from the University of Rochester in 1991, graduating magna cum laude with honors in Anthropology and Phi Beta Kappa. Her academic career includes positions at the University of Colorado Boulder as Associate Professor of Geography and International Affairs from 2008 to 2014 and Assistant Professor from 2000 to 2008, before joining Indiana University as Associate Professor in 2014 and advancing to full Professor in 2018. Dunn's research in social science centers on forced migration, with over a decade of ethnographic work on refugees and internally displaced persons in the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Poland, Kyrgyzstan, Greece, Germany, and the United States. Her studies explore humanitarian camps as sites of bureaucratic regulation and existential crisis, the failures of refugee aid, volunteer networks in crises, and urban infrastructures repurposed for refugees. She also investigates food studies, including global food safety regulations in Colorado's beef industry, Poland's pork sector, and Georgia's processing, as well as labor dynamics in postsocialist transitions and U.S. meatpacking dependent on refugee labor.

Dunn's influential scholarship includes two major books: No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Cornell University Press, 2004), the latter winning the 2005 Orbis Book Prize from the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies and the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. Key articles appear in American Ethnologist, Slavic Review, Antipode, Science, Ethnos, and Humanity, such as "The Empire Strikes Back: War Without War and Occupation Without Occupation in the Russian Sphere of Influence" (2014) and "Refugee Protection and Resettlement Problems" (2016). She contributes to public discourse via Slate, Boston Review, and serves on editorial boards for American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, and others. Dunn has held leadership roles including Councilor for the American Ethnological Society, Program Chair for the Council for European Studies, and Senior Panel Reviewer for the National Science Foundation. Her honors include the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Fellow (2020-2021) and University of Colorado Provost’s Faculty Achievement Award (2006). She delivers invited lectures at institutions like Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre and Aarhus University.

Professional Email: elcdunn@iu.edu