Christina Novakov-Ritchey earned her Ph.D at the University of California - Los Angeles and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Houston - Clear Lake. At UHCL, she teaches incarcerated undergraduate and master’s students in the Transforming Lives by Degrees Program. Her courses focus on colonialism, magic/healing, art history, historical materialism, and performance studies.

Dr. Novakov-Ritchey is also the co-organizer of the (Post)Socialist Studies Group funded by the UC Humanities Research Institute and a core member of the Dialoguing Posts Network. Her research on incantation-based healing practices in the postsocialist Balkans has recently been published by KAJET magazine and the European Journal of Cultural Studies.

In addition to her research on postsocialism and traditional healing, other areas of research include peasant studies, self-taught art, racial capitalism in the Balkans, contemporary art, and anticolonial praxis.