Sana Chavoshian is a historical and environmental anthropologist who has held a position at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin since 2021. Previously, she worked for five years at the Multiple Secularities Centre for Advanced Studies at Leipzig University, where she also earned her PhD. She studies how people experiment with, adapt to, commemorate, and politicize “impure” environments in the aftermath of war and sanctions. She has extensive experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork in war environments in Iran and Iraq. Her focus spans war ecology, reparational discourses and practices, atmospheres, the anthropology of Islam, and material religion. Her book Women, Martyrs and Stones in Iran’s Post-War Politics (Edinburgh University Press), set to be published in 2025, explores how mothers and wives of Iran-Iraq war martyrs honour their memories in pious circles, dreams, cemeteries, and pilgrimage to the former battlefields. Currently she is the co-spokesperson of the MENA Middle East and North Africa region in the German Association of Social and Cultural Anthropology.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Chavoshian, Sana. Women, Martyrs and Stones in Iran’s Post-War Politics. Edinburgh University Press, 2025.
- Chavoshian, Sana. “Suspension: Dust-Wind in Iran under Sanctions”. Journal of Iranian Studies 58, no. 2 (2025): 1–19. https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/journals/iranian-studies/article/abs/suspension-dustwinds-in-iran-under-sanctions/7A05351F5F74E6FCFA265283F24F7365.
- Chavoshian, Sana. “A Secular Atmosphere: The Work of Dust in Iran’s Landscapes of War”. Journal of Secular Studies, 7, no. 2 (2025): 302–323. https://brill.com/view/journals/secu/7/2/article-p302_7.xml.
- Chavoshian, Sana. “Affective Consanguinity: Blood, Mothers and Martyrs in the Iran-Iraq War”. Handbook of Oriental Studies 179 (2024): 157–181.
- Chavoshian, Sana. “Dream-Realities: Materializing the Martyrs and Missing Soldiers of Iran-Iraq War”. Religion and Society: Advances in Research 11, no. 1 (2020): 149–165.
