Nancy Ries is Professor of Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University, Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program there, and a member of Colgate's Russian and Eurasian Studies faculty. She has done anthropological fieldwork in Russia since the 1980s, and is the author of Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika. Ries has published essays on Russian mafia, gender relations, and on the everyday violence of war and social conflict. Her article “Potato Ontology: Surviving Postsocialism in Russia” was published in 2009 in the journal Cultural Anthropology and won the "Cultural Horizons Prize" from the Society for Cultural Anthropology. She has also co-authored a virtual museum of Soviet Communal apartments (kommunalka.colgate.edu). She is currently writing about the threatened extinction of elephants through poaching, but her next project will involve a study of higher education in Russia and Ukraine.