I have received most of my education from the University of Bergen, and have been working as as Senior Lecturer at SAI since August 2024. My main research interests concern sovereignty, state formation, political violence, and -- increasingly -- drones and apocalypticism. I have done most of my research in Kurdistan (Iraqi, Turkish, and Syrian), as well as some work in Germany. My focus has primarily been on the Kurdish movement, but I have later started to work on the Iraqi Kurdish pseudo-state and its evolving international relations.
I am very happy to be teaching a lot of different courses at SAI, starting with 1400 "Anthropology of Religion" and parts of 1300 "Economic Anthropology" in 2024.
About:
I completed my PhD project in December of 2019 at the University of Bergen. My doctoral work examined the role of martyrdom in the social movement most commonly known as the ‘Kurdish Freedom Movement.’ The doctoral work was a part of Prof. Bruce Kapferer’s large ERC-funded project Egalitarianism: Forms, Processes, Comparisons. The resulting book manuscript is currently under review.
In August 2021, I received a grant from the Research Council of Norway for a three-year project called Emic Sovereignties and Global Intersections. The project set out to examine how sovereignty could be re-conceptualized ethnographically outside the confines of the state. The project was a collaboration between the University of Bergen and the University of Oxford’s Centre for Global History.
I finished my Master’s thesis in Social Science at the University of Chicago in 2014, where I examined the process by which ideological consubstantiality was created in a local anarchist organization.