Zoë Berman

Zoë Berman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies. Zoë is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies generational memory and trauma, political ideology, identity formation, transitional justice, and postcolonial theory, with a focus on Rwanda. Her book project, Ideology at the Hearth: Generational Aspirations and the Politics of Identity in Post-Genocide Rwanda draws on two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork to explore how Rwandan youth respond the demand to move past ethnic identity yet remember ethnic conflict, as well as the pressures they face to distance themselves from elder generations mired in antagonism. Following the everyday lives of young people living in Rwanda’s northwest, the book illustrates how youth interrogate ideas about difference as they transform what it means to be “Rwandan” today. She is currently developing a second project on the evolution of Rwanda’s mental health sector after 1994, which will be conducted with two Rwandan collaborators in the social sciences.

Zoë holds a PhD from the University of Chicago’s interdisciplinary Department of Comparative Human Development (2024) and has been working in Rwanda since 2011. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright International Institute of Education (IIE), the Wenner Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Rwandan National Commission Against Genocide. Her research has been published in the African Studies Review and the Rwandan anthology series Home Grown Solutions (LIT-Verlag).

Selected Publications:

“Ubunyarwanda and the Evolution of Transitional Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda: ‘To Generalize Is Not Fresh.’” African Studies Review 66, no. 3 (2023): 777–800