Amy Malek

Background

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.

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 University

Selected Publications

Culture Beyond Country: Strategies of Inclusion in the Global Iranian Diaspora, NYU Press, forthcoming October 2025. https://nyupress.org/9781479831760/culture-beyond-country/

“On Unity and Fragmentation in the Iranian Diaspora,” Society for Cultural Anthropology HotSpots - Woman, Life, Freedom Series, Fieldsights, June 29, 2023. 

“Clickbait Orientalism and Vintage Iranian Snapshots,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 24, No. 2 (2021): 266-289. (Winner of the 2021 Alixa Naff Prize in Migration Studies) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1367877920957348

“Subjunctive Nostalgia of Postmemorial Art: Remediated Family Archives in the Iranian Diaspora,” Memory Studies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (2021): 140-158. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698019843977

“Paradoxes of Dual Nationality: Geopolitical Constraints on Multiple Citizenship in the Iranian Diaspora,” Middle East Journal, Vol. 73, No. 4 (Winter 2019): 531-554. https://doi.org/10.3751/73.4.11

“Displaced, Re-rooted, Transnational: Considerations in Theory and Practice of Being an Iranian outside Iran,” Identity and Exile: The Iranian Diaspora between Solidarity and Difference, Heinrich Böll Foundation (2016). https://us.boell.org/en/2016/04/27/identity-and-exile-iranian-diaspora-between-solidarity-and-difference

“Claiming Space: Documenting Second-Generation Iranian Americans in Los Angeles,” Anthropology of the Middle East, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2015): pp. 16-45. https://www.berghahnjournals.com/abstract/journals/ame/10/2/ame100203.xml

“Public Performances of Identity Negotiation in the Iranian Diaspora: The New York Persian Day Parade,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2011): 388-410. https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-abstract/31/2/388/59678/Public-Performances-of-Identity-Negotiation-in-the?redirectedFrom=fulltext

““If you're going to educate 'em, you've got to entertain 'em too”: An Examination of Representation and Ethnography in Grass and People of the Wind,” Iranian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 3, May 2011. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00210862.2011.556373

“Memoir as Iranian exile cultural production: A case study of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis series,” Iranian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 3, September 2006, pp. 353- 380. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00210860600808201?journalCode=cist20

Courses Taught

ANTH 350: Anthropology of Migration
AMST 350: Diasporic America
AMST 390: Refugees & Forced Migration
AMST 715: Echoes of Migration: Memory & Displacement

Website

https://www.amymalek.com/