Sana is a historical and environmental anthropologist working at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin since 2021. She has worked at the Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple Secularities” for five years in Leipzig University, where she received her PhD. She studies how people experiment and come along with, as well as commemorate and politicize “impure” environments in the aftermath of war and sanctions. Much of her ethnographic fieldwork is based in Iran and Iraq. Her focus spans war ecology, reparational discourses and practices, atmospheres, anthropology of Islam and material religion. Her book “Women, Martyrs and Stones in Iran’s Post-war Politics” (Edinburgh University Press) appears in 2025 and explores how mothers and wives of the Iran-Iraq war martyrs commemorate them in pious circles, dreams, cemeteries and pilgrimage to the former battlefields. Currently she is the co-spokesperson of the MENA region in the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
Publikationen (Auswahl)
- Women, Martyrs and Stones in Iran’s Post-War Politics, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, in Vorbereitung.
- „Suspension: Dust-Wind in Iran under Sanctions.“ In: Rethinking the Matter of Facts: The Unlikely Things that Sustain Modern Iran, Sonderausgabe von: Journal of Iranian Studies, in Vorbereitung.
- „A Secular Atmosphere: The Work of Dust in Iran’s Landscapes of War.“ In: Birgit Mayer, Magnus Echtler und Yasemin Ural(Hrsg): Material Secularity, Sonderausgabe von: Journal of Secular Studies, in Vorbereitung.
- „Affective Consanguinity: Blood, Mothers and Martyrs in the Iran-Iraq War.“ In: Yafa Shanneik u. a. (Hrsg.): Handbook of Oriental Studies 179, Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala: Religion that Matters, Leiden: Brill, 2024, 157–181.
- Sana Chavoshian: „Dream-Realities: Materializing the Martyrs and Missing Soldiers of Iran-Iraq War.“ In: Hansjörg Dilgeru. a. (Hrsg.): Elsewhere Affects,Sonderausgabe von: Religion and Society: Advances in Research 11.1, 2020, 149–165.