Werner, Cynthia

Dr. Cynthia A. Werner is a professor of anthropology and a longtime affiliate of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program. She serves as Senior Executive Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences and previously was the Acting Executive Associate Dean (August 2023 to mid-February 2024) as well as Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs (June 2022 to mid-February 2024). She holds M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in anthropology. Dr. Werner joined the Texas A&M faculty in 2001 as a member of the Department of Anthropology, where she served as head from 2011 to 2019. She has been conducting ethnographic field research in the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Mongolia for the past 30 years. Her research has focused on how relatively marginalized groups have been impacted by Soviet and post-Soviet state projects, including the Soviet emancipation of women, the Soviet nuclear testing program, the post-socialist economic transition and Kazakhstan’s ethnic repatriation program. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, National Research Council and American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a past president of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (2012-14). Dr. Werner previously has served as the director of ADVANCE at Texas A&M (2019-2022), a period during which she shifted her research accordingly while coordinating two regular workshops aimed at ensuring fair and equitable review processes for faculty hiring and faculty promotion. She led an ADVANCE research project on the differential impacts of COVID-19 on Texas A&M scholars that led to university guidelines for conducting faculty evaluations within the context of the pandemic. In addition, she was involved in a collaborative, multidisciplinary research project examining forms of bias in the promotion and tenure review process.