Marija Norkūnaitė

Marija Norkūnaitė works in the field of political and economic anthropology, and her research investigates state-society relations in the Baltic States, with a particular focus on economic and fiscal citizenship.

Marija holds a DPhil in Area Studies (Russia and Eastern Europe) from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis looked at Russian-speaking communities and their relationship and lived experiences with the state in Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Before coming to Yale, Marija was a Vilnius University Foundation junior research fellow at the Vilnius University Institute of International Relations and Political Science. She is also a member and co-convenor of the European Association of Social Anthropologists’ Anthropology of Tax Network.

While at Yale, Marija will be working on a book project based on her doctoral dissertation, which will look at the social contract between the state and society as imagined and lived by the mainly Russian-speaking residents of three former socialist towns in the Baltics. She will also be developing a new research project on fiscal citizenship among minority and migrant populations and taxpayers in Lithuania.