Sarah Czerny is a social anthropologist and Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka. She also serves as Deputy Executive Director at the Centre for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe (CAS SEE). Her research focuses on human–animal relations, especially human–microbial relations, as well as on anthropological knowledge practices and the ways knowledge is produced through ethnographic work.

Her work moves across social anthropology, cultural studies, multispecies relations, food studies, and ethnographic theory. A recurring strand in her research examines milk, cheese, fermentation, and microbial life as sites where material, ecological, and cultural relations intersect. Her publications connect detailed ethnographic inquiry with broader questions of disciplinarity, relationality, and more-than-human worlds.

Selected publications

• Absent Interests: On the Abstraction of Human and Animal Milks (Brill, 2022)
• “Writing ‘for’ the Cows: Ecofeminism, Anthropology and Disciplinarity” (2024)
• “‘Cheese’ and ‘Cheez’? On the Relation between Plant-Based and Dairy-Based Cheeses” (2023)
• “Thinking about social mutualism in transhumant farming in Croatia” (Anthropology Today, 2023)
• “Negotiating the Duplexity of Ethnographic Relations” (Open Anthropological Research, 2021)
• “A-Pasteurianism in Croatian dairy work: another form to human–microbial relations” (2018)
• “Dogs don’t speak”. A consideration of the flow of knowledge between dogs, anthropologists and humans” (Narodna umjetnost, 2012)

Project

• CO-GREEN (1 Dec 2022 – 1 Dec 2024)