Associate Professor Natasha Fijn is Director of the Australian National University’s Mongolia Institute. She has been awarded a mid-career Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to enable her to conduct ongoing research relating to 'A Multi-species Anthropological Approach to Influenza' (2022-2026) in Mongolia. She was previously part of an ARC Discovery team project on the transfer of Mongolian medicinal knowledge, while her specific focus was on prevention and healing by Mongolian herding families, including herd animals (2019-2023).

Natasha wrote a seminal multispecies ethnography based in Mongolia, 'Living with Herds: human-animal coexistence in Mongolia' (2011). She has co-edited several books and journal volumes, including three special issues oriented toward visual anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking, and three engaging with multispecies and sensory or visual anthropology. With Muhammad Kavesh she recently edited the book, 'Nurturing Alternative Futures: living with diversity in a more-than-human world' (2024).

Natasha is particularly interested in multispecies studies, including more-than-human sociality, concepts of domestication and mutualism, eco-health, natural-cultural heritage and conservation. She has conducted extensive field research in remote places, including the Khangai Mountains of Mongolia and Arnhem Land in northern Australia. She was also a founding committee member of Plumwood, an environmental humanities-oriented organisation acting as stewards for the biocultural heritage on Plumwood Mountain in New South Wales.

Multispecies ethnography, visual anthropology, sensory anthropology, observational filmmaking, animal studies, environmental humanities, ecological anthropology, animal domestication, Mongolia, Inner Asia, Yolngu, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, biocultural heritage, Ethnoveterinary medicine, Mongolian healing