Roxani Krystalli

Thesis Topic: Representations of leadership in Weimar film and photography

What Now: Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor), University of St Andrews, UK

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The question that anchors my work is what sustains life in the face of loss. My undergraduate studies centered around understanding narratives of violence and injustice, as conveyed in texts in both the social sciences and the humanities. I was particularly interested in critical analyses of power, and specifically in feminist theory and gender analysis of armed conflict. After graduating from Harvard, I was committed to understanding violence not only in theory or from a distance, but also in terms of exploring how individuals experience it in the day to day and build lives in its wake. For nearly two decades, I have worked as a humanitarian and peacebuilding practitioner with a specific focus on gender and violence. I now work primarily in academia and, through my research, I seek to understand both how people make sense of loss and what enables them to imagine flourishing lives in its wake. In recent years, I have broadened the focus of my work beyond the violence of war to explore how people live with other forms of loss, such as those resulting from illness, grief, and ecological devastation. For the past few years, alongside a wonderful international team of researchers, I have been co-leading a research project on the role of love and care in helping us imagine how to live with loss. You can read more about that project here: https://www.takingloveandcareseriously.com