Amy Malek

Education

PhD, Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
MA, Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
MA, Near Eastern Studies, New York University (NYU)
BA, Middle Eastern Studies & International Studies, Emory Universit

Bio

I am a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in the intersections of migration, citizenship, memory, and culture with a focus on Iranian and Southwest Asian migration and diasporic contexts in North America and Europe. I am especially interested in how immigrants and their descendants actively construct cultural belonging and navigate the constraints and possibilities shaped by state projects, market logics, racial formations, and digital technologies. Drawing on my background in Anthropology and Middle East Studies, employ ethnographic methods alongside analyses of visual and digital culture in an effort to advance critical conversations in migration studies, memory studies, transnational American studies, and digital and media anthropology.

My first book, Culture Beyond Country: Strategies of Inclusion in the Global Iranian Diaspora (NYU Press 2025), examines how Iranians in Los Angeles, Stockholm, and Toronto have strategically mobilized culture to assert belonging within the multicultural frameworks of their diaspora homes. Drawing on transnational and comparative ethnographic fieldwork and over 125 semi-structured interviews conducted in Sweden, Canada, and the United States over the course of sixteen years (2007–23), the book examines diasporic cultural citizenship and how Iranians in diaspora have actively navigated their multicultural societies and cultural policies to assert their presence and redefine their identities amid geopolitical hostility and experiences of exclusion. By highlighting the tensions between cultural visibility and political marginalization, Culture Beyond Country brings a critical lens to immigrant integration and advances new ways of thinking about cultural citizenship in an era of neoliberal multiculturalism.

My current research examines the digital social lives of diaspora family archives and artifacts. Through analyses of the multiple uses and digital circulations of family photographs, home movies, and ephemera, this study examines visual and media objects as they are mobilized at the intersections of diasporic collective memory, transnational politics, and citizenship. It seeks to demonstrate how diasporic memory practices are not merely acts of preservation, but dynamic fields where personal and collective identities, geopolitics, and racial imaginaries collide.