Sonia Rupcic

  • Visiting Scholar

Sonia Rupcic is a Visiting Scholar of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of Pittsburgh and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University. She is a medical and legal anthropologist whose scholarship and teaching focus on sex/gender, medical humanitarianism and carceral politics. Her current book project, Incommensurable Violations: Criminal Sex and its Others in Post-Apartheid South Africa, explores how survivors of sexual violence in South Africa are recruited to participate in the policing of rape in a context of ethnoracialized legal pluralism. It focuses on the different ways injury is conceptualized during the course of state medico-legal activities. 

In South Africa and the United States, Sonia has worked in the field of survivor advocacy since 2004.

Education & Training

  • PhD, Anthropology, University of Michigan, 2020
  • MPH, Public Health, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, 2011
  • BA, University of Chicago, 2004

Representative Publications

Rupcic, S. (2021). Mens Daemonica: Guilt, Justice, and the Occult in South Africa. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 63(3), 599–624. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000165

 

Rupcic, S. (2013). Rights rhetoric or rights realization: Victim empowerment NGOs in South Africa. Ethnography, 14(4), 452–476. https://doi.org/10.1177/1466138112457294

Research Interests

Sex/Gender

Transnational Feminisms 

Sexual Violence

Medical Anthropology

Legal Anthropology

Medical Humanitarianism

Carceral States