Nelli Sargsyan

Dr. Nelli Sargsyan is a cultural and linguistic anthropologist by training. As a feminist, she sits at the disciplinary intersections of political anthropology, queer studies, and affect studies, among others. Her most recent research focuses on relationships across borders of nation-states and species that sustain life, and reproductive justice in conditions of militarization.

In her scholarly-poetic work and teaching, Dr. Sargsyan is interested in stretching disciplinary and genre boundaries to explore the multi-sensory possibilities of feminist world-making. While grounded in her home discipline of feminist cultural and linguistic anthropology, she has been increasingly experimenting with multimodal ethnographic practice by communicating her ethnographic insights through what she calls anthro-performance, which weaves together poetry, songs, and conventional social scientific analysis to create affective resonances between the ethnographer and the viewer-reader-listener. This practice invites audiences to care for the unfamiliar others about whom she speaks through the knowledge gained both at conference presentations, as well as in some of her most recent publications.

Dr. Sargsyan’s work has appeared in academic journals such as Feminist Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, as well as on online platforms such as Ms. Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), and Anthropology Now.