Susan Slyomovics

Susan Slyomovics is a Distinguished Professor in the UCLA Department of Anthropology, with a joint appointment in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1985. Her research focuses on gender, human rights, folklore and material culture, visual anthropology, and the Middle East and North Africa within the subfield of sociocultural anthropology. Slyomovics teaches undergraduate and graduate courses including Visual Anthropology: Documentary Photography, Oral Literature and Performance of the Arab World, and Culture Area of the Maghrib North Africa.

Slyomovics has authored and edited numerous influential publications. Key books include Monuments Decolonized: Algeria’s French Colonial Heritage (Stanford University Press, 2024), How to Accept German Reparations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), and The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance (University of California Press, 1987). She edited Ordering Imperial Worlds: From Late Medieval Spain to the Modern Middle East (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), Race, Place, Trace: Essays in Honour of Patrick Wolfe (Verso, 2022), and Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium (Indiana University Press, 2013). Recent articles cover topics such as female winged victory statues in French Algeria (2024), settler colonial memorials in Algeria (2023), and repairing colonial symmetry through archive restitution (2021).

Her scholarship has earned major awards, including the Edward M. Bruner Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association for Monuments Decolonized (2025), CAORC-NEH Fellowship (Algeria, 2023-24), Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association Distinguished Senior Scholar Award (2014), Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association (1999), Guggenheim Fellowship (1995-96), and Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2002-03). Slyomovics is an elected Fellow of the American Folklore Society (2001).

Professional Email: ssly@anthro.ucla.edu