Research Fellow, Raoul Wallenberg Institute
About
Dr. Anoush Tamar Suni is a sociocultural anthropologist who studies political violence and the aftermath of genocide; the politics of history and memory; ruins, landscape, and cultural heritage; and religious and ethnic minority communities in the Middle East. At the Wallenberg Institute, she will be completing her first book, Memory in Ruins: Politics of History and the Afterlives of Genocide in Anatolia. Based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in eastern Turkey, this book traces the interconnected pasts and presents of Muslim Kurdish and Christian Armenian communities with a focus on state violence, local memory, and the material landscape of ruins. Dr. Suni is also at work on a second ethnographic project—Imagining the Underground: Violence, Value, and Enchanted Treasure—which explores the hunt for mythical buried Armenian gold as a material interaction with a history of genocide and displacement in the context of a violent present. Dr. Suni’s research has been published in the journals Comparative Studies in Society and History, Anthropological Quarterly, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies.
