Dr Kristina Jonutytė
Dr Kristina Jonutytė is an anthropologist and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, Department of Social Anthropology (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, UKRI Guarantee).
Her research project is entitled “Minority Russia: Negotiating Racialisation and Belonging at a Time of War”. The focus of this research is on migrants from the Inner Asian regions of Russia who have fled the country to South Korea, Mongolia and beyond in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war and its reverberations in the region. Kristina’s PhD research was on contemporary urban Buryat Buddhism in Ulan-Ude (2019, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology & Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany). Since then, she has worked at Vilnius University and Vytautas Magnus University. Her book “Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Urban Religion and Minority Politics at the Asian Borderlands of Russia” is forthcoming (2026) with Cornell University Press. She has published on religion, diverse urban space, and multiethnic politics, among other topics.
Select publications
- Jonutytė, Kristina. Forthcoming (2026). Between the Buddha and the New Tsar: Minority Religion and Belonging at the Asian Borderlands of Russia. Cornell University Press.
- Jonutytė, Kristina and Ivanskis, Edvinas. Forthcoming (2025). “Passivity, Resistance or Refusal? Post-2022 Buryat Outmigration to Mongolia” (co-authored with Edvinas Ivanskis). Inner Asia 27: 362-386.
- Jonutytė, Kristina. 2023. “Buryatia and Buryats in Light of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”, Russian Analytical Digest 301: 7-10.
- Zhanaev, Ayur and Jonutytė, Kristina. 2023. “Introduction: The Voices of Russia’s Minorities on the Invasion of Ukraine” (with Ayur Zhanaev), Inner Asia 25: 111-117.
- Jonutytė, Kristina. 2023. Sticky Relationships at Wartime, Allegra Lab. https://allegralaboratory.net/sticky-relationships-at-wartime/ .
- Jonutytė, Kristina. 2022. “Taming the City: Unfinished Religious Expansion in Buryatia”, Ethnos 89(5): 907-925.
- Jonutytė, Kristina. 2022. “Post-Soviet City as a Communal Apartment: Spatialized Belonging in Ulan-Ude”, Nationalities Papers 50(5): 1022–1036.
- Jonutytė, Kristina. 2020. “Shamanism, Sanity, and Remoteness in Russia”, Anthropology Today, 36(2): 3-7.
Select awards
- 2023 – Caroline von Humboldt prize, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
- 2023 – The Lithuanian Academy of Sciences: Best audiovisual popular science project award for the anthropology radio show “Ten ir atgal”
- 2022 – The Lithuanian Academy of Sciences: Young Scholar’s Award
