Rebecca Bryant is professor and holder of the Chair in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. She is also a visiting professor at the European Institute of the London School of Economics (LSE). Bryant is an anthropologist of politics and law focusing on the ethnography of the state, particularly ethnic conflict and displacement, border practices, post-conflict reconciliation, and contested sovereignty on both sides of the Cyprus Green Line and in Turkey. She has long-term research interests in temporality, memory, and historical reconciliation and has investigated these topics through research in Cyprus and Turkey. For the past decade, she has researched everyday life in unrecognized states, adding to her Cyprus research preliminary investigations in Abkhazia. Her most recent works include The Anthropology of the Future (Cambridge, 2019) with Daniel M. Knight; Sovereignty Suspended: Building the So-Called State (Pennsylvania, 2020) with Mete Hatay, and The Everyday Lives of Sovereignty: Political Imagination Beyond the State (Cornell, 2021), co-edited with Madeleine Reeves. Her latest work, Lives in Limbo: Syrian Youth in Turkey (with Amal Abdalla, Maissam Nimer, and Ayşen Üstübici), will be published by in 2023 with Berghahn Books. 

The "Stateless Sovereignties" speaker series seeks to explore the concept and practice of sovereignty outside of its traditional euro- and state centric heritage and definitions, by inviting internationally renown scholars to unpack, pluralize and disassemble the concept with perspectives coming from the margins of the global order. By moving sovereignty beyond its conventional connection to statehood, the series aims to adapt the concept to a new set of circumstances, so that it may better account for the many radical experiments with governance across the world, and the rapid changes impacting peoples' ways of relating to each other.