Melissa Chiovenda is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College. She completed a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Connecticut and an MA in Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University.
Melissa is currently revising her dissertation for publication. Her chapter entitled Hazara Civil Society Activists and Local, National, and International Political Institutions will be published by Indiana University Press in the edited volume titled Modern Afghanistan: The Impact of 40 Years of War in April 2018, and her chapter Memory, History, and Landscape: Ethnic Hazaras’ Understanding of Marginality in Bamyan, Afghanistan was published by Lexington Books in 2015 in the edited volume State, Society, and Minorities in South and Southeast Asia. Melissa has, over the summers of 2016 and 2017, started a second research project concerning the political identity of Afghan refugees in Athens, Greece.