Professor Yael Navaro FBA

Summary

Yael Navaro is a social anthropologist who specializes in the study of politics, the state, and political violence and its aftermaths. She has contributed to crafting a distinctively affective, spatial and material approach for the study of postwar environments, embedding social, political, and psychological anthropology through new methodologies. Regionally, her work has focused on social and political life in Turkey and Cyprus, and she has a dedicated ongoing interest in ethnographically studying politics and the aftermath of mass violence in the everyday of the region. She has conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in Istanbul, Cyprus and Antakya. Her publications, research collaborations, and teaching also explore the politics of ethnographic and archival research, dealing with issues of representation and erasure.

Originally from Istanbul, Turkey, Professor Navaro studied at Brandeis University (BA in Sociology, 1991) and Princeton University (MA in Anthropology, 1993 and PhD in Anthropology, 1998). She was a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (1997-1999) and has been teaching at the University of Cambridge since 1999. She is currently Professor of Social, Political and Psychological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Social Anthropology at Newnham College.

Professor Navaro’s first book Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey (Princeton University Press, 2002) is a study of the production of a state-revering public culture in Turkey through ethnographic work on the interface between secularism and Islamism in Istanbul. This interest led her, in further research, to study the unrecognized state in Northern Cyprus and its administration. She conceptualised this space through a query about affect and materiality in a postwar environment. Her second book The Make-Believe Space: Affective Geography in a Postwar Polity (Duke University Press, 2012), based on long-term fieldwork in Northern Cyprus, explores affect and the emotions retained in homes, spaces and personal objects expropriated and used in the aftermath of war, along a makeshift border, as well as in the documents, bureaucracy, and legal practices of an unrecognized state.

Between January 2012 and December 2016, Professor Navaro was the Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) project entitled “Living with Remnants: Politics, Materiality and Subjectivity in the Aftermath of Past Atrocities in Turkey” (REMNANTS). The project addressed the aftermath of mass violence in the contemporary everyday of Turkey through the core concept of ‘remnants’ which was explored as the material, spatial and political legacy of past atrocities. A core co-edited volume based on this project has been published under the title Reverberations: Violence Across Time and Space (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). This book puts political violence studies in conversation with posthuman philosophy, making a distinctive contribution to the anthropology of violence.

Professor Navaro has been writing a book based on long-term fieldwork on inter-communal relations in post-2012 Antakya, Turkey. Her further current work explores more-than-human worlds in the aftermath of catastrophe, focusing especially on the earthquake that hit the city of Antakya in 2023, and connecting her research interests in the anthropology of politics with environmental anthropology.

Professor Navaro has given several named and keynote lectures including the Malinowski Memorial Lecture (London School of Economics, 2007), the Marett Memorial Lecture (Oxford, 2023), and the Berndt Lambert Memorial Lecture (Cornell, 2025), among others.

Professor Navaro was first elected as a Fellow through the Anthropology & Geography section and then became a cross-member with Africa, Asia and the Middle East, Anthropology and Geography.