Patty A. Gray is currently Garden Program Director at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Until June 2016 she was a full-time tenured Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at Maynooth University of Ireland. She was previously a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, which followed a three-year post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin Madison, along with a Graduate Certificate in Russian, East European and Central Asia Studies. She has an MA in Anthropology from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and a BA in Communication (Journalism) from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.

Current Research Interests

Dr. Gray teaches Environmental Studies and Sustainable Gardening at the University of the Pacific and investigates food gardening in comparative perspective – what she calls “global gardening”. As a Russia specialist engaging in critical development studies,  she has studied the role that international development assistance has played in the way Russians see themselves and their relationship to the world. She is also interested in the use of online social media in protest movements, and recently published an article in American Ethnologist titled, “Memory, body and the online researcher: Following Russian Street demonstrations via social media”.

 Additional Areas of Expertise

Anthropological ethics; indigenous peoples; social movements; pastoralism; privatization and property relations; anthropology of religion; circumpolar Arctic.