CANR
WORK TITLE: WHAT REMAINS
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
CITY: Washington
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Dartmouth College, B.A., 1994; Tufts University, M.A.L.D., 2002; Harvard University, Ph.D., 2006.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. University of North Carolina, Greensboro, instructor; George Washington University, Washington, DC, associate professor.
AWARDS:Fainsod Prize, Harvard University, 2001; Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017; Public Scholar Award, National Endowment for the Humanities, 2017.
WRITINGS
Also, coauthor, with L.J. Nettelfield, of Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide, 2014. Contributor of articles to publications and chapters to books.
SIDELIGHTS
Sarah E. Wagner is a writer and educator. In 1994, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College. Wagner went on to obtain a master’s degree from Tufts University in 2002 and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2006. She has served as an instructor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro and as an associate professor at George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts & Sciences.
In 2008, Wagner released her first book, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. Her second book, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide, cowritten with L.J. Nettelfield, also focuses on the Balkan conflict.
Wagner’s 2019 volume, What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War, finds her discussing the history of America’s practice of returning the bodies of fallen soldiers to their families. She explains that the military began identifying and sending bodies home during the Civil War. The practice continued during World War I, during which families could choose whether to have their loved ones buried abroad or brought home. The popularity of repatriation led the military to change its policy by the Korean War, during which all fallen soldiers were repatriated. Wagner goes on to discuss the massive international effort to identify and send home the bodies of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. She explains that the project has been lengthy and expensive, and it is still incomplete. However, it has benefited from recent scientific advances, including DNA analysis. A critic in Kirkus Reviews described the volume as “an expert account of a little-known but massive forensic program.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2019, review of What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War.
ONLINE
George Washington University, Columbian College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Anthropology, https://anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu/ (October 16, 2019), author faculty profile.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, https://www.gf.org/ (October 16, 2019), author profile.
Sarah Wagner
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Sarah Wagner
Academic background
Alma mater
Harvard University
Academic work
Sarah E. Wagner is an American professor of Anthropology at the George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow. Wagner is especially recognized for her research and work on genocides.[1][2]
Contents
1
Early life and education
2
Career
3
Works
3.1
Books
4
Awards and recognitions
5
References
Early life and education[edit]
Wagner graduated with a B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1994 and obtained an M.A.L.D. from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 2002. In 2006, she received a Ph.D. from Harvard University.[3]
Career[edit]
Wagner started her career at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she taught for five years.[4] Subsequently she came to the George Washington University.
Wagner works both in America, as well as "in the field" in different countries around the world and also supervises work around the world.[5][6][7]
Wagner is frequently interviewed about her work in different publications and writes articles, blogs and columns herself.[8][9][10][11]
Works[edit]
Wagner has (co-) published two books and various articles and book chapters. She is currently working on her third publication, for which she was awarded two scholarships.[3][12]
Books[edit]
To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing (2008)[13]
Srebenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (2014, with Nettelfield)[14]
Awards and recognitions[edit]
Throughout her academic career, Wagner has received different scholarships, fellowships and grant in support of and for her work.[3][15]
In 2001, Wagner received the Fainsod Prize or top incoming graduate students at Harvard University and in 2005, received a fellowship to complete her dissertation "The Return of Identity: Technology, Memory, and the Identification of the Missing from the July 1995 Massacre in Srebrenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina".[16][17]
In 2015, Wagner's second book (Srebenica in the Aftermath of Genocide) received an Honorable Mention for the International Studies Association’s Ethnicity, Migration and Nationalism Distinguished Book Award. The book was also listed for the Rothschild Prize of the Association for the Study of Nationalities in the same year.[3][18][19]
In 2017, Wagner received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Public Scholar award by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to finish her third book "Bringing Them Home: Identifying and remembering Vietnam War MIAs".[3][12]
Sarah E. Wagner
Title:
Associate Professor of Anthropology
Faculty:
Full-Time
Office:
HAH 301
Email:
sewagner@email.gwu.edu
Areas of Expertise
War and memory; nationalism; biotechnology and forensic science; post-conflict social reconstruction; forced migration and diaspora; interventionism; military culture. Regional foci: Bosnia and Herzegovina and the U.S.
Professor Wagner is a social anthropologist who works in the former Yugoslavia and the United States. Her research has explored connections between the destructive and creative forces of war, focusing on the identification of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina, specifically victims of the Srebrenica genocide, and the United States military's attempts to recover and identify service members Missing In Action (MIA) from the past century's conflicts.
Current Research
Prof. Wagner has conducted research in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United States, and in Vietnam alongside U.S. military personnel. Her first book was an ethnographic study of the forensic and commemorative practices developed in response to the Srebrenica genocide. Her second book, co-authored with Lara Nettelfield, examined intervention into postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina, again focused on Srebrenica and its legacy of loss and remembrance.
Ongoing projects
Her current research focuses on the U.S. government’s attempt to account for its service members Missing In Action (MIA) and presumed dead from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. As part of this project, in 2017, Dr. Wagner received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Public Scholar to complete her third book, What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War (Harvard University Press, November 2019). The book traces shifting modes of commemoration and notions of national and local belonging through the recovery, identification, and return of remains for US Missing In Action from the Vietnam War.
Education
Ph.D. 2006, Harvard University
M.A.L.D. 2002, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
B.A. 1994, Dartmouth College
Publications
Books
2019 Wagner, S. What Remains: Bringing America’s Missing Home from the Vietnam War Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
2015 Nettelfield, L.J., and S. Wagner. Srebrenica nakon genocida. Bosnian edition of 2014 book. Sarajevo, Bosnia: Institute of History, University of Sarajevo.
2014 Nettelfield, L.J., and S. Wagner. Srebenica in the Aftermath of Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press.
2008 Wagner, S. To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
2018 Wagner, S. and T. Matyok, “Monumental Change: The Shifting Politics of Obligation at the Tomb of the Unknowns,” co-authored with Thomas Matyok, History & Memory 30(1): 40-75.
2017 Jugo, A. and S. Wagner, “Memory Politics and Forensic Practice: Exhuming Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Missing Persons,” in Zuzanna Dziuban, ed., Mapping the ‘Forensic Turn’: Engagements with Materialities of Death in Holocaust Studies and Beyond. Vienna: New Academic Press, 121-139.
2017 Rosenblatt, A. and S. Wagner. “Known Unknowns: DNA Identifications, the Nation-state, and the Iconic Dead, in Chris Stojanowski and William Duncan, eds., Studies in Forensic Biohistory: Anthropological Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
2016 Wagner, S. and Kešetovic, R. “Absent bodies, absent knowledge: The forensic work of identifying Srebrenica’s missing and the social experiences of families,” in Derek Congram, ed., Missing Persons: Multidisciplinary Perspectives and Methods on Finding the Disappeared. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
2015 Wagner, S. "The quandaries of partial and commingled remains: Srebrenica’s missing and Korean War casualties compared." In Francisco Ferrándiz and Antonius Robben, eds., Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2015 Daynes, S. and S. Wagner. "Usages contemporains de Marcel Mauss dans les sciences sociales aux Etats-Unis (A propos du don et du commerce de sang, d’organes, et de cellules)." In E. Dianteill, ed., Marcel Mauss: en théorie et en pratique, 271-292. Paris: Archives Karéline.
2015 Wagner, S. “A curious trade: The recovery and repatriation of Vietnam MIAs," Comparative Studies in Society and History 57(1): 161-190.
2015 Jessee, E., and S. Wagner. "Among the Anonymous Dead: Exhumations and the 'Emotive Materiality' of Deceased Victims of Mass Violence," Emergent Conversations: Part I Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR).
2014 Wagner, S. "The social complexities of commingled remains.” In B. Adams and J. Byrd, eds., Commingled Human Remains: Methods in Recovery, Analysis and Identification. New York: Academic Press.
2013 Wagner, S. “The making and unmaking of an Unknown Soldier,” Social Studies of Science 43(5): 631-656.
2010 Wagner, S. “Identifying Srebrenica’s missing: The ‘shaky balance’ of universalism and particularism.” In A. Hinton, ed., Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
2010 Wagner, S. “Tabulating loss, entombing memory: The Srebrenica-Potocari Memorial Centre.” In E. Anderson, A. Maddrell, K. McLoughlin, and A. Vincent, eds., Memory, Mourning, Landscape. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
2010 Wagner, S. "Response to “Deleuze and an Anthropology of Becoming,” by João Biehl and Peter Locke, Current Anthropology 51(3): 344-45.
2009 Wagner, S., and C. Quintyn. "Dismantling a national icon: Genetic testing and the Tomb of the Unknowns," Anthropology News 50(5), May.
Classes Taught
To see syllabi, click on the course title.
Anth 1002: Introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology
Anth 2008: Foundations of Anthropology
Anth 2502: Anthropology of Science and Technology
Anth 3531: Methods in Sociocultural Anthropology
Anth 6391: Topics: War and Memory
Anth 6531: Methods in Sociocultural Anthropology
Sarah Wagner
Fellow: Awarded 2017
Field of Study: Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Competition: US & Canada
Website: https://anthropology.columbian.gwu.edu/sarah-e-wagner
Sarah Wagner is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at George Washington University. Her research has explored the connections between the destructive and creative forces of war. Through it, she has sought to understand how war fosters and often requires innovation, from its perpetrators and its victims alike, both as violence unfolds and after arms are laid to rest. Much of her work centers on the phenomena of missing persons and the forensic efforts to recover them, subjects that have urged an interdisciplinary approach to studying the scientific, social, and political processes of post-conflict repair.
Wagner is the author of To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing (University of California Press, 2008) and co-author with Lara J. Nettelfield of Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which received Honorable Mention for the International Studies Association’s Ethnicity, Migration and Nationalism Distinguished Book Award (2015) and was shortlisted for the 2015 Rothschild Prize of the Association for the Study of Nationalities. She has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the National Endowment of Humanities, IREX, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and has published widely in journals and edited volumes in anthropology, forensic sciences, and science and technology studies. Her writing has also appeared in popular outlets, including the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Times, and St. Louis Dispatch.
The Guggenheim fellowship will support Wagner’s third book, tentatively entitled Bringing Them Home: The Identification and Commemoration of Vietnam War MIAs. A study of war, memory, science, and innovation, the book is the culmination of several years of ethnographic and archival research that Wagner has conducted on the efforts to account for and memorialize U.S. service members Missing In Action (MIA) and presumed dead from the past century’s major conflicts. It focuses on American MIAs of the Vietnam War—some 1,600 still unaccounted for—attending to the fractious politics that have shaped how the war is recalled and its fallen remembered, and the forensic scientific advances that entwine the living with the dead in the project of national belonging.
Wagner earned an AB at Dartmouth College, Master of Law and Diplomacy at the Fletcher School (Tufts University), and PhD at Harvard University. Prior to joining George Washington University, she taught for five years at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
QUOTED: "an expert account of a little-known but massive forensic program."
Wagner, Sarah E. WHAT REMAINS Harvard Univ. (Adult Nonfiction) $29.95 11, 5 ISBN: 978-0-674-98834-7
The often painful stories behind the recovery of American dead left behind during wars, with an emphasis on the nearly 1,600 still missing in Vietnam.
Wagner (Anthropology/George Washington Univ.; To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica's Missing, 2008, etc.) reminds readers that America's compulsion to bring home battlefield dead--unique among nations--began with the Civil War, during which a small army of embalmers followed the troops. After World War I, bereaved families had the option of burial in France or repatriation; 70 percent chose the latter. Beginning in the Korean War, all recovered bodies were returned. Peace accords signed by North Vietnam in 1973 contained a clause requiring cooperation in recovering those still unaccounted for, and POW/MIA activist groups continue to pressure the U.S. government over Americans still missing. "That demand…has given rise to a forensic enterprise, which, in its attempts to order facts and bodies, has spanned decades, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and returned thousands of absent American war dead to their surviving families and to the nation," writes the author. Traveling widely, Wagner chronicles her encounters with individuals and communities dealing with tragic losses. She also visited labs to describe the tedious but often imaginative work that can tease out an identity from a fragment of bone. DNA analysis has been a major advance, but, informed by TV crime shows where DNA solves all problems, journalists and legislatures regularly denounce the labs--unfairly, according to Wagner--as a haven for stick-in-the-mud scientists and time-serving bureaucrats. The response has been shakeups and a congressionally mandated, vastly increased yearly quota of identifications. Ironically, this obsession with "body count" has reduced Vietnam recoveries to less than 10 percent. Few sites, mostly plane crashes, remain in Southeast Asia but earlier wars have left cemeteries, battlefields, and tiny Pacific islands with innumerable unidentified remains available to fill the quota.
An expert account of a little-known but massive forensic program.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wagner, Sarah E.: WHAT REMAINS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A599964386/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e4c23b53. Accessed 7 Oct. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A599964386