Jessica Greenberg

Jessica Greenberg is a Professor of Anthropology and Associate Head of the Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also serves as Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. She is a 2025-2026 LAS Dean's Distinguished Professorial Scholar. Greenberg earned her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2007, a Master of Studies in Law from the University of Illinois College of Law in 2017 as an LAS Fellow for Study in a Second Discipline, and a BA in Women's and Gender Studies from Columbia University in 1997. Her career includes an Academy Scholar position at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies in 2007, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University from 2008 to 2012, and progression from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor and then full Professor in Anthropology at UIUC since 2012.

A legal and political anthropologist, Greenberg's research focuses on revolution, social change, democracy, justice, and human rights in the Balkans and Europe more broadly. Her ethnographic work explores the everyday lives of social movements, democratic activism after the Cold War, and legal institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights. She is the author of Justice in the Balance: Democracy, Rule of Law, and the European Court of Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2025) and After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia (Stanford University Press, 2014). Key publications include "Disappointment" (with Sarah Muir, Annual Review of Anthropology, 2022), "Law, politics, and efficacy at the European Court of Human Rights" (American Ethnologist, 2020), "Counterpedagogy, Sovereignty, and Migration at the European Court of Human Rights" (Law and Social Inquiry, 2021), "On the Road to Normal: Negotiating Agency and State Sovereignty in Postsocialist Serbia" (American Anthropologist, 2011), and "Beyond East and West: Solidarity politics and the absent/present state in the Balkans" (with Ivana Spasić, Slavic Review, 2017). Greenberg has received two Fulbright Fellowships, including one to the University of Strasbourg in 2020, a National Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences grant (2018-2020), the LAS Conrad Humanities Scholar award (2018-2023), and a UIUC Campus Research Board Award (2013).

Professional Email: jrgreenb@illinois.edu