Adrie Kusserow
St. Michael’s College
Adrie Kusserow is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, VT where she teaches classes on refugee resettlement, medical and psychological anthropology. She received her BA from Amherst College, MTS from Harvard Divinity School in 1990 and her PhD in medical anthropology from Harvard University in 1996. She is the author of five books, an ethnographic memoir The Trauma Mantras (Duke University Press), two ethnographic books of poetry entitled Hunting Down the Monk and REFUGE (BOA Editions, Ltd), an ethnography American Individualisms (Palgrave MacMillan) and a book of creative nonfiction The Beautiful Agonies (Duke University Press). Most of her field work has been with refugees, internationally and in Vermont, where she lives on the land she grew up on. She is co-founder of Africa Education and Leadership Initiative: Bridging Gender Gaps Through Education (www.africaeli.org) and has done refugee related field work in Uganda, South Sudan, Bhutan, Northern India and Vermont.
Talk Information:
Rethinking Trauma: South Sudanese Refugee ‘Healing’ and its Assumptions
September 25, 2026 | 9:00 AM
Drawing from field work with resettled South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, South Sudan and Vermont, Kusserow’s talk will be a mixture of readings from her ethnographic poetic memoir The Trauma Mantras (Duke University Press) as well as contextual remarks for each piece that reflect and elaborate on her anthropological critique of the prominence and assumptions of Western conceptions of trauma in well intentioned efforts to heal and understand resettled South Sudanese refugees in Vermont. She explores psychologized individualism, American middle class conceptions of the fragility of the self, and assumptions about trauma with respect to the role these play in resettlement programming for South Sudanese and in refugee related programs for South Sudanese girls in Uganda. She also considers the gradual adoption of a more individualistic conception of self made by South Sudanese refugees in an attempt to adapt to American culture.