Ieva Jusionyte is an award-winning author and legal anthropologist. She is the Watson Family University Associate Professor of International Security and Anthropology at Brown University. Born and raised in Lithuania, Jusionyte earned her B.A. degree in political science from Vilnius University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology from Brandeis University, in Massachusetts. Before coming to Brown, she was John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Jusionyte studies borders, law, and violence, and is the author of three books, including multiple-award winning Threshold: Emergency Responders on the U.S.-Mexico Border (2018), which received the 2019 Victor Turner Prize In Ethnographic Writing and the 2020 SAW Book Prize. Her new book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border, came out in April 2024.

Jusionyte has held fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Fulbright program, and her fieldwork and writing have been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. In addition to research articles published in flagship scholarly journals, Jusionyte’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and Rolling Stone, and she’s been the featured guest on CNN’s GPS, ABC News Live, and multiple NPR shows.

Apart from her scholarly pursuits, Ieva Jusionyte is a trained EMT, paramedic, and wildland firefighter, and spent five years volunteering in fire and rescue departments in Massachusetts, Florida, and Arizona. She lives in Boston.