Coordinator

Dr. Alyssa Miller

(Postdoc, Institute for Middle East Studies, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) / Germany)

Alyssa Miller is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Middle East Studies at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University and was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania from 2019-20. Her research investigates socio-political transformations in Tunisia and the wider SWANA region following the 2011 Arab Uprisings, particularly from the viewpoint of marginalized communities. She has written on precarity and its representation in Tunisian cultural production, anti-corruption movements in the context of transitional justice, uneven development and (in)security in borderland regions, and the transformation of kinship through experiences of ambiguous loss. She is currently working on a book project that examines kin-based strategies to defend citizenship rights for alleged ex-fighters and other Tunisian returnees from the Islamic State, and to secure the repatriation of fighters’ wives and stateless children. Her publications include “’I Do Not Forgive!’ Refusal and Hope in Tunisia’s Democratic Transition” (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 2021) and “Kin-Work in a Time of Jihad: Sustaining Bonds of Filiation and Care for Tunisian Foreign Combatants” (Cultural Anthropology, 2018).