Dr Elizabeth Turk

I am a social anthropologist with foundational training in women’s studies. My research takes an historically inflected approach to the study of power relations and health-related practices. At the intersection of medical anthropology, political anthropology, and environmental humanities, my forthcoming monograph Therapeutic Nature: modernist cosmologies, concept work, and the making of healing traditions in contemporary Mongolia is based on my doctoral dissertation at the University of Cambridge (2018). The book ethnographically explores the body, national identity, and natural environment as they relate to dynamic regimes of value in Mongolian public life.

I have designed and coordinated a number of research projects funded by IIE Fulbright, Henry Luce Foundation, the American Center for Mongolian Studies, UKRI (as part of a team), and the Wellcome Trust. I have also held a Junior Research Fellowship (2022-2025) at Wolfson College, Cambridge.

From 2020 to 2025, I worked as a Research Associate on a UK Arts and Humanities funded project entitled, Mongolian Cosmopolitical Heritage: tracing divergent healing practices across the Mongolian-Chinese border, PI-ed by Prof David Sneath. This project traced the politics of linking health and cultural heritage, exploring the shaping effects of political economy on Covid-focused ritual practice across national borders.

Most recently, I have been awarded a Career Development Award from the Wellcome Trust for a 5.5-year project entitled, Accessing the Wellbeing Commons: therapeutic resource-ification of natural and historic environments and social exclusion in the UK and Inner Asia. This new, comparative project explores barriers to accessing therapeutic natural and historic commons in Sikkim (India), Mongolia and Devon (UK), focusing on water-based health practices to better understand how identities that tend to be associated with exclusion are made and re-made through capitalist social relations. Reflecting the project’s mixed methods approach, it is hosted by the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Newcastle University.

Fore-grounding critical theory in a range of sub-disciplinary contexts, l have designed, instructed and assessed undergraduate- and graduate-level anthropological theory and methods courses at Cambridge University and Columbia University in New York City. I have taught on critical issues of contemporary global life; the social, economic, political and moral aspects of development; the anthropology of post-socialist societies, and topics specific to Inner Asia.

I have also worked as Inner Asia Regional Curator of On the Move: Rethinking Nomadic Pastoralism (2022-2023), a temporary exhibition at the National Museum of Qatar exploring the lives of nomadic pastoralists in Central Sahara, Qatar, and Mongolia.