MIddle east conference

Dr. Younes Saramifar is an interdisciplinary anthropologist and assistant professor of Inhumanities at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His work focuses on narratives of dominance and political storytelling, with a particular focus on religious populism, collective memory, and the materiality of social and cultural practices. He combines methods from ethnography, Material Religion, Visual Studies, intersectional feminism, Critical Race Theory and Speculative Realism to connect the everyday and the unexpected in his research.
Saramifar holds two PhDs — one in Cultural Sociology (2016) from the Delhi School of Economics and a second (2020) in Cultural Anthropology in the Netherlands — and has worked internationally in countries such as Australia, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, India, the Netherlands and Sweden. His work has been recognised with awards including an Einstein Research Fellowship, the Niels Stensen Fellowship and grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation.
His research covers themes such as war, memory and the role of objects in social and political forms of life. Among other things, he investigates the way in which conflicts and collective traumas are shaped and narrated.