Biopics

Zahira Araguete-Toribio is a PhD candidate in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London. Her research focuses on different forms of scientific, historical and social identification endeavors in connection to the exhumation of the bodies of the Spanish Civil War and postwar dead, in the southwestern region of Extremadura. With a special interest on ideas of evidence production and temporality, she investigates the intersection between different types of knowledge (familial, archaeological, legal) and their connection to the cultural materiality of conflict. Her work also involves the use of video and photographic material as analytic tools to carry out her research. She is also a research assistant and conference coordinator in the ERC funded project Bosnian Bones Spanish Ghosts, at the Anthropology Department in Goldsmiths.
http://www.gold.ac.uk/anthropology/current-students/zahiraaraguete/ 

Dr. Paul Basu is Reader in Material Culture and Museum Studies at University College London. He is a social anthropologist specializing in issues relating to cultural heritage, memory and landscape. For the past 10 years he has been working in Sierra Leone and is currently writing a monograph provisionally entitled Palimpsest Memoryscapes: Cultural Heritage and National Consciousness in Sierra Leone. He recently directed the AHRC-funded ‘Reanimating Cultural Heritage’ project, an output of which was the www.sierraleoneheritage.org digital heritage resource. He also recently curated an exhibition at the British Museum entitled Sowei Mask: Spirit of Sierra Leone. He is Co-Investigator of the AHRC ‘Utopian Archives’ Research Network. Earlier books include Highland Homecomings: Genealogy and Heritage-Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora and Exhibition Experiments (co-edited with Sharon Macdonald).
www.ucl.ac.uk/archaeology/people/staff/basu

Pamela Colombo is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, Spain) and at the University of País Vasco (UPV). She holds a BA in Sociology from the University of Buenos Aires, and a MA in Philosophy of History from the University Autónoma de Madrid. She was Visiting Scholar at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics (CUNY), the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldmisths College) and the Freie Universität Berlin. She also co-organized the “Spatialities of Exception, Violence, and Memory” International Conference (Madrid, February 2012). Her PhD research examines the reconfigurations produced on space after the process of forced disappearance in Argentina (1974-1983), by analyzing the ways of dwelling in and imagining the space in the aftermath of the conflict by the victims.
http://csic.academia.edu/PamelaColombo

Lee Elizabeth Douglas a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at New York University, where she completed a graduate certificate in Culture and Media. She holds an MSc in visual anthropology from Oxford University and an MA in sociocultural anthropology from NYU. At present, Douglas is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid. Trained as a visual anthropologist, photographer, and filmmaker, Douglas’ dissertation research examines the intersection of forensic and documentary practices in post-Franco Spain. In addition to her work in Spain, Douglas has conducted extensive research on issues of memory, visuality, and the production of meaning in post-dictatorship Argentina and Chile. In 2012, Douglas co-curated the exhibition Artless Photographs with anthropologist Stephanie Sadre-Orafai. Showcasing a diverse group of photographic images and practices, the exhibit sought to juxtapose the placelessness of photographs alongside their embedded institutional ecologies in order to demonstrate how alternative historical narratives can be produced through the most mundane of imagery.
http://nyu.academia.edu/LeeDouglas

Irit Katz Feigis is a PhD candidate in the department of Architecture, University of Cambridge. She is a Girton College Scholar, affiliated to ‘Conflict in Cities’ research programme. Irit obtained her B.Arch degree in Architecture from Bezalel Academy for Art and Design, Jerusalem, and her MA in Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies from Bar-Ilan University. She has worked as an architect in Tel-Aviv and in London, specializing in urban planning and housing projects. Her PhD research examines camps in Israel/Palestine as a spatial-political instrument used in order to achieve political objectives both by the sovereign and by its subjects.
http://www.conflictincities.org/CV-Irit_Katz_Feigis.html


Joost Fontein lectures social anthropology at the university of Edinburgh. His research explores the political and material imbrications of landscapes, things and human substances in Zimbabwe, where he has carried out extended ethnographic fieldwork since the late 1990s. His doctoral fieldwork in southern Zimbabwe (2000-2001) explored the politics of heritage and landscape around Great Zimbabwe National Monument. Winning the ASA UK Audrey Richards Prize in 2004 this was published as a monograph in 2006. He is currently finishing a second book entitled Remaking Mutirikwi: landscape, water and belonging in southern Zimbabwe, which explore the political materialities and cultural politics of land reform in around a modern dam in southern Zimbabwe. He is also writing another book entitled The Politics of the Dead & the Power of Uncertainty: Essays on materiality, rumours and human remains in Post-2000 Zimbabwe which explores the affective presence and emotive materialities of human remains in Zimbabwe. He is a founding member of the Bones Collective research group (http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/research/bones_collective), editor of the Journal of Southern African Studies (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjss20/current#.UdPwNBzIb58), and co-founder of a new Africanist journal called Critical African Studies (http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcaf20#.UdPwXRzIb58).

Safet HadžiMuhamedović is a Doctoral Candidate and Visiting Tutor in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His current research interests include the study of landscape and belonging in Bosnia, folk concepts of time and space, oral histories, and place and placelessness in Romani communities. His thesis traces the geographies framed by harvest and fertility festivities in Bosnia. Safet’s publications include the forthcoming edited volume titled Arts of Memory: Skilful Practices of Living History (CSP) and the chapter on the agentive qualities of the Tree of Gernika in the ASA Monograph edited by Dr Penny Dransart. Safet contributes to Dr Sari Wastell’s ERC-funded project Bosnian Bones, Spanish Ghosts: ‘Transitional Justice’ and the Legal Shaping of Memory after Two Modern Conflicts and is the founder of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research of Visual Culture in Sarajevo. He holds degrees in Anthropology, Sociology and History of Art from the universities of Cambridge, Sarajevo and Kenyon College.
http://www.gold.ac.uk/anthropology/current-students/safethadimuhamedovi/

Dr. Charlotte Heath-Kelly is a research fellow at the University of Warwick’s Department of Politics and International Studies. She currently holds a grant from the British Academy for the project ‘Securing through the Failure to Secure: Reclaiming the Sites of Terrorist Attack’ which explores the politics of memorialisation and redevelopment around sites of contemporary ‘terrorist’ attacks. Her work has appeared in the journals Security Dialogue, The British Journal of Politics and IR, and Critical Studies on Terrorism. In October 2013, Routledge will publish her monograph on violence and ex-militant memory in Cyprus and Italy entitled: Politics of Violence: Militancy, International Politics, Killing in the Name.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/pais/people/heath-kelly/

Marije Hristova is a Ph.D. candidate at Maastricht University (NL). She holds an MA in History from the University of Groningen (NL) and an MA in Spanish Literature from the University of Amsterdam (NL). Currently she is working a Marie Curie fellow at the Institute for Language, Literature and Anthropology; Spanish High Council for Scientific Investigation (Madrid, Spain) where she is a member of the nationally funded research project The Past Below Earth on exhumations and memory politics from anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz. Her doctoral thesis explores the transnational frameworks and imageries that play a role in the re-emergence of the memories of the Spanish Civil War in contemporary Spanish literature. Marije’s interests lay in the field of Hispanic studies, memory studies and contemporary literature and cinema.
http://csic.academia.edu/MarijeHristova

Maria Elisabeth Hüren is Ph.D. candidate (Anglophone Literatures and Cultures) and research assistant at Goethe University Frankfurt. She holds a BA in Political Science from RWTH Aachen University and completed her MA in Literary and Media Studies at Wuppertal University in September 2011 with a thesis on memory media devised to travel to (socially, culturally, geographically) distant contexts. The working title of her Ph.D. project is “‘Memory Translation’ in Recent Anglophone Novels: Narrating Civil Wars to Distant Audiences” and her research interests include theories of representation, concepts of transculturality, cognitive and contextualist narratologies, as well as popular culture and (im)mediacy.
http://www.memorystudies-frankfurt.com/people/mh/

Laura Major is a graduate of University College London (BSc Anthropology Hons) and University of Edinburgh where she completed an MRes in Anthropology of Health and Illness in 2009 (awarded with distinction). Her current project, an ESRC funded PhD studentship, builds on her interest in the body in crisis and in death through research examining the management of the bodies of genocide victims contained with mass graves and crypts in Rwanda. She has recently returned from fifteen months of fieldwork in Rwanda, during which she worked alongside local community members as they unearthed, washed and reburied victims recovered from mass temporary burial. Alongside these activities she carried out contextualizing work with a Rwandan palliative care nurse and a Kigali based youth advocacy organization. She is currently writing up this research into a doctoral thesis, to be completed in 2014. Her work feeds into broad themes emerging within the anthropologies of memory, politics and materiality in spaces of conflict and post-conflict.
http://www.san.ed.ac.uk/research_students/laura_major

 Dr. Yael Navaro-Yashin is Senior Lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002) and The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012). She is presently Principal Investigator on a five-year ERC Starting Investigator Grant studying politics, subjectivity and materiality in the aftermath of violence in Turkey.
http://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/people/core-academic-staff/dr-yael-navaro-yashin/

Stephanie Sadre-Orafai is assistant professor of Anthropology and co-director of the Critical Visions certificate program at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on transformations in contemporary US racial thinking and visual culture through the lens of expert visions. She has published essays on booking photography, casting, model development, and fashion reality television and is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled Visual Anxiety: Fashioning Difference in 21st Century America. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the New York fashion industry, the book examines how modeling and casting agents discursively construct, image, and imagine the visibility and significance of racial and other forms of social difference, exploring the social and political ramifications of these new articulations of mediation, visibility, and "difference" as they are refracted through idioms of beauty, desirability, and justice. She is beginning a second project on criminal profilers with the goal of reading casting archival practices against the logics of criminal database organization. She plans to compare the diagnostic and predictive dimensions of each field and how these disparate sites of knowledge and visual production reflect and impact wider socio-cultural beliefs about the visibility of essential and inessential "differences" in the US.  
http://tinyurl.com/SadreOrafai

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. His most recent work is on post-Holocaust culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of memory, race and violence. He has just published a book on connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary entitled Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (Berghahn, 2013). His co-edited book with Griselda Pollock Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s ‘Night and Fog’ was published in 2011 (Berghahn). 
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/people/20053/french/person/738/max_silverman


Pwyll ap Stifin is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. His thesis, “An Archive of Sound and Silence: Memory, Voice and 9/11”, based on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in New York, concerns the means by which the aural relates to the memory of 9/11. Concerned particularly with sound and with the voice as a pernicious, operative materiality, the thesis argues for an understanding of the archive and of the materiality of memory as fluid, dynamic and processual. He holds an MA in Material and Visual Culture from University College London and has previously worked as a field archaeologist.

Amanda Wicks is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Louisiana State University. Her dissertation examines how contemporary post-apocalypse narratives re-conceptualize the relationship between space and memory in order to address contemporary fears regarding forgetting. Currently, she has two forthcoming articles: “‘No other tale to tell’: Trauma and Acts of Forgetting in The Road” (in Within Trauma, eds. Monica Casper and Eric Wertheimer, NYU Press) and “‘All this happened, more or less’: Traumatic Memory as Science Fiction in Slaughterhouse Five” (in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction). She has also presented her work at the American Literature Association Conference, Northeast Modern Language Association Conference, Southeast Modern Language Association Conference, and the Canadian Association of American Studies.
http://www.english.lsu.edu/English_People/item24678.html