When I first embarked on dissertational field research in the majority Kurdish town of Wan (Van) in eastern Turkey in the fall of 2011, I soon began working with a group of Kurdish women singers and poets.
Marlene Schäfers
Marlene Schäfers is assistant professor in cultural anthropology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Herresearch focuses on voice, gender, and representation, and the politics of death and the afterlife in the context of modern Turkey and the Kurdish regions. Her first monograph, Voices that Matter: Kurdish Women at the Limits of Representation in Contemporary Turkey, was published in 2023 with the University of Chicago Press. Her work has been supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, the Wiener-Anspach Foundation, the Research Foundation Flanders, and the British Academy. She holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge and was the 2021 Evans Pritchard Lecturer at All Souls’ College, University of Oxford.