Samar Zora Memorial Lecture 2026

The Samar Zora Memorial Event is a student-led event in the department of anthropology to commemorate Samar Zora, former student, interlocutor, and friend, who died in the earthquake that struck Eastern Turkey and Northwestern Syria on February 6, 2023. Held in her honour, the event foregrounds innovative research on the anthropology of the Middle East and the anthropology of religion - areas closely aligned with Samar’s academic focus.

This year's lecture will be by Stefania Pandolfo, Professor of Anthropology (UC Berkeley), entitled The Disappeared.

Abstract:
“My presentation is drawn from a book in process and is scarred by this moment and its spectral inscriptions, at a time when destruction is a continuous event in the MENA region, as the field of life and daily death, pointing an exigency to think and 'see otherwise.' Moving between my ethnography of madness and imagination in Morocco and my collaboration with the Syrian film collective Abounaddara, their short films realized during the revolution and civil war, and 'The Imagemaker' (2024), I explore liturgical, devotional, and artistic practices of the living image amid a history of destruction, and the capacity of form to disclose other worlds, at the border of the visible and the invisible.”

Bio:
Stefania Pandolfo is a Professor and Lowie Distinguished Chair in the Department of Anthropology and member of the programs in Critical Theory and Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her work centers on subjectivity, imagination, memory, trauma, and the experience of madness, with a focus on the Maghreb and Islam and in conversation with psychoanalysis and Islamic thought. She is the author of Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago 2018); Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago 1997); and co-author with Ann Lovell, Veena Das, and Sandra Laugier of Face aux désastres: Une conversation à quatre voix sur la folie, le care, et les grandes détresses collectives (Editions d’Ithaque, Paris, 2013 and 2025). She guest curated Matrix 274, “J’accuse”, a contemporary art exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum featuring the work of Kader Attia, and co-curated an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum entitled, “Abounaddara: The Ruins We Carry”. She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Art-Cure: Imagework at a Time of Catastrophe.