Dr. Ruth Mandel

Professional Background

Dr. Ruth Mandel, a professor and former vice dean international at University College London, holds a PhD from the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology. Her early research focused on migration between Turkey, Greece, and Germany, and resulted in her prize-winning book, Cosmopolitan Anxieties: Turkish Challenges to Citizenship and Belonging in Germany. Her subsequent research in Kazakhstan examined media, development, and migration, leading to numerous articles and the book Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Dr. Mandel has collaborated on various research projects, including “Language, Legacy and Landey,” which investigates diasporic Afghan poetry and is led by Dr. Rachel Lehr, in partnership with colleges from Norway, Toronto, and the United Kingdom. Her ongoing research with Dr. Lehr addresses Holocaust commemoration and ‘counter-memorials’ in Europe, focusing on artist Gunter Demnig’s Stolperstein project, which is being worked into a book.

Dr. Mandel has served as a visiting professor at Harvard and as a guest professor at the Graduate Institute Geneva, the University of Vienna, and the University of Minnesota. She is also the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, a Kennan Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, Fulbright, DAAD, the Economic and Social Research Council, Arts, and the Humanities Research Council, among others.

Fellowship Research

Dr. Ruth Mandel was awarded the Sosland Foundation Fellowship for her research project, “Stolpersteine: From Ethnography to the Archives.” Her research aims to demonstrate the array of subtleties that an anthropological approach brings to studies of memory, commemoration, and atrocity; to determine the extent to which different types of memorials challenge divergent narratives of the Holocaust; and to propose a theoretical intervention at the intersection of memory, landscape, and affect, in salient, charged sites.

During her fellowship, Dr. Mandel plans to conduct an in-depth analysis of the Museum’s self-published, non-digitized Stolperstein town remembrance books to provide a critical context for the ethnography of the Stolpersteine project and shed light on the conflicting narratives about the relationship between the towns’ past and present. Drawing on anthropology and social science methodologies, this exploration of previously unexamined material is expected to reveal new insights into the relationships among people, places, and material objects.

Residency Period: January 1–April 30, 2024