About

Jessica R. Storey-Nagy

Linguistic and Political Anthropology
Area and International Studies
Hungarian Studies
jestorey@iu.edu

I am a Research Associate and Adjunct Faculty at Indiana University Bloomington in the Department of Anthropology and the Russian and East European Institute, respectively. In July 2022, acquired a PhD in the Department of Central Eurasian Studies (Hungarian Regional Specialization) with a PhD minor in Anthropology at the same IU Bloomington. I’m a political and linguistic anthropologist interested in how talk and text form our understanding of citizenship and of political actors, how talk contributes to our understanding of sovereignty and nationhood, and how the way we converse (or don’t) with our friends and family members in private spaces can influence our preference as voters. As an area studies scholar, I study language ideology, disinformation, the language of violence and conflict, and culture in modern-day Hungary, East Europe, and the European Union.

RESEARCH
To explore different facets of political talk, I conducted field work in Hungary under a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) Fellowship (2019- early 2020). In my dissertation, titled “Sovereign Voices: Politics, Identity, and Meaning-Making in Contemporary Hungary,” I employ qualitative anthropological field methods to explore how talk during a municipal election aided citizens in negotiating political meaning.
My publications and book manuscript further explore and make way for future research concerning linguistic landscaping and its role in the multi-sensory, multimodal process of political communication, and the divide between (or fractal recursivity of) “Soviet-ness” and “Hungarianness” as it manifests in material objects. I recently designed a research project that will explore citizens’ use of certain political texts as they realize and negotiate mismatched language ideologies and search for, broadly speaking, truth.

TEACHING
Presently, I am Adjunct Faculty in the Russian and East European Institute where I teach both undergraduate and graduate students. There, I have taught The Anthropology of War and Conflict in East Europe (REEI-R 300/500; INTL-I 306), Disinformation and the State in East Europe (REEI-R 300/500), – both courses of my own design– Current Issues and Conflict in Eastern Europe (REEI-R 201), and Pro-seminar in Russian and East European Area Studies (REEI-R 600). I also teach Authoritarian Discourse in the IU Hutton Honors College for the Wells Scholars Program (HON-H 300). In the 2022/2023 academic year, I held a Visiting Faculty position and worked as a Regional Expertise and Culture Instructor on base at Ft. Carson, Colorado for Indiana University’s Language Workshop. In the recent past, I have taught as an Associate Instructor in IU’s Department of International Studies and as Instructor of Record at IU’s Collins Living-Learning Center. I also designed courses for IU’s Language Workshop for IU Expand, an online platform. Past courses taught include Introduction to International Studies (INTL-I100), Peace and Conflict (INTL-I206), and Nation and Governance in Hungary (CLLC-120), a course of my own design. In it, students simulated a semester-long “model EU” in order to gain a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between state sovereignty and the supranational Union.
In 2020, I worked as the Curriculum Coordinator at IU’s Russian and East European Institute (REEI) developing area-specific curriculum for primary school students. You can find some of my lesson plans here.

PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
I believe talking about politics in a conscious, respectful way leads to productive compromise and is the best way toward positive large- and small-scale political change. I encourage conversation among students about the political problems that plague us all. I have worked toward these goals with outreach programs at both IU’s Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center and the Russian and East European Institute, where I was the Outreach Graduate Assistant. I enjoyed my time with the IAUNRC’s outreach program at Claflin University and said as much, here.