Dr. Sana Chavoshian
Sana Chavoshian is a historical and environmental anthropologist working on how people live in and politicize hazardous atmospheres and impure environments shaped by multiple and recurrent wars and sanctions in the long afterlife of the British oil empire in Iran and the lower Mesopotamia. She has held a research position at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO) in Berlin since 2021. In 2025, she was awarded a one-year fellowship at the Center for “Cultural Practices of Reparation” at Saarland University.
As a fellow at CEMES, Chavoshian investigates the “alien messiah”: a savior assembled from debris, dismembered bodies, and colonial remnants who rises to enact justice for the living and the dead. It asks how recurrent wars, petrochemical extraction, and imperial conspiracies generate conspiratorial tropes of imagining end-time justice that exceeds official Shi'i eschatology. Through a multi-modal study of four Arabophone and Persian science fiction works, ethnographic dream-narratives, and personal archives from the British colonial era, she will explore the alien messiah as a figure who takes shape person by person, dream by dream, object by object. Her project aligns with the core mission of CEMES by exploring how this conspiratorial imagination shapes alternative visions of end-time justice in response to crisis.
