Ieva Jusionyte (Ph.D., EMT-P) is a legal and medical anthropologist and a certified emergency medical responder. 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, is coming 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 (Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and others), Jusionyte’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian, and she’s been the featured guest on NPR’s “The Takeaway” and “Forum.”

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.