Susan Slyomovics
· Distinguished ProfessorUniversity of California, Los Angeles · Anatomy and Cell Biology
Active 1986–2025
About
Susan Slyomovics is a Distinguished Professor in the UCLA Department of Anthropology, specializing in sociocultural anthropology with research interests that include gender, human rights, folklore and material culture, visual anthropology, and the Middle East and North Africa. Her work focuses on issues of memory, reparations, and cultural politics within these regions, often exploring themes related to colonial histories, ethnographic performance, and social justice. She has contributed extensively to the understanding of oral traditions, performance, and the politics of memory, particularly in North African contexts such as Morocco and Algeria. Her scholarly contributions include editing and authoring numerous books and articles that examine the intersections of anthropology, history, and human rights, with a particular emphasis on colonial legacies and postcolonial reconciliation processes. Slyomovics's work is recognized for its detailed ethnographic approach and its engagement with contemporary debates on reparations, memorialization, and cultural heritage. She has also been involved in public lectures and multimedia projects that highlight her research on human rights and oral epic performances in the Middle East and North Africa.
Research topics
- Art
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Visual arts
- Ancient history
- Engineering
- Law
- Philosophy
- Art history
- History
- Geography
- Mechanical engineering
Selected publications
Three Generations, One Wiedergutmachung
2025-03-07
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe author’s mother and grandmother survived internment in the Auschwitz, Płaszów, and Markkleeberg camps. How did three generations of women regard Wiedergutmachung? Who applied, who refused, and who is implicated? What are the variety of positions taken, spoken about, and enacted? Although German reparation protocols of 2004 and 2018 to Algerian Jews are considered marginal both geographically and financially to the Holocaust of European Jews, nonetheless an initial account of reparations to Algerian Jewry will be shown to intersect with three generations of the author’s family history, Czechoslovakian Jews confronting the perils and possibilities of Germany’s Wiedergutmachung.
Female Winged Victory Statues in French Algeria
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-03-14
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingStanford University Press eBooks · 2024-06-06 · 7 citations
book1st authorCorresponding"Statuomania" overtook Algeria beginning in the nineteenth century as the French affinity for monuments placed thousands of war memorials across the French colony. But following Algeria's hard-fought independence in 1962, these monuments took on different meaning and some were "repatriated" to France, legally or clandestinely. Today, in both Algeria and France, people are moving and removing, vandalizing and preserving this contested, yet shared monumental heritage. Susan Slyomovics follows the afterlives of French-built war memorials in Algeria and those taken to France. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in both countries and interviews with French and Algerian heritage actors and artists, she analyzes the colonial nostalgia, dissonant heritage, and ongoing decolonization and iconoclasm of these works of art. Monuments emerge here as objects with a soul, offering visual records of the colonized Algerian native, the European settler colonizer, and the contemporary efforts to engage with a dark colonial past. Richly illustrated with more than 100 color images, Monuments Decolonized offers a fresh aesthetic take on the increasingly global move to fell monuments that celebrate settler colonial histories.
Female Winged Victory Statues in French Algeria
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-07
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingMonumental statuary and memorial sculptures were erected throughout France as well as French Algeria (1830–1962) that attest to a “statuemania” exported from the metropole to their North African prize colony. After World War I, commemorative public statuary emerged from the elevated deaths of the European settler communities and the forcibly conscripted Muslim “native” troops of Algeria. Public statuary of women in both colony and metropole were usually allegorical figures such as statues of the female Winged Victory. This essay compares the interwar Winged Victory statues placed on top of the war memorial in Constantine, Algeria, erected by Algerian Jewish Sculptor Joseph Ebstein (1881–1961) to other victory statues in Algiers, Oran, Er-Rahel, and Sétif. Winged Victory sculptures tell the story of French colonial memorialization, implantation, destruction of walled Arab cities, spoliation, and heritage regimes in the service of an allegorical female sculpture.
8. Female Winged Victory Statues in French Algeria
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2024-05-08
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingIntroduction: Engaging the Work of Zeynep Çelik
Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Sociology
- Engineering
A Settler Colonial Memorial Book: The Agricultural School and Museum of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, Algeria
Diaspora A Journal of Transnational Studies · 2023-09-01
article1st authorCorrespondingIn French colonial Algeria (1830–1962), a European settler community was made from both displacement and the encounter with Indigenous Algerian collectives. After Algeria's independence from France in 1962, this community was remade by a second displacement and the encounter in France with the metropolitan community. Known as Pieds-Noirs, this community has organized associative life, books, and newsletter publications, and sometimes return visits to Algeria. This article looks at Pieds-Noir settler associations devoted to Algeria's colonial agricultural schools, model farms, and nurseries, and how they reconstitute metropole-colony and colony-metropole through memory and a memorial book. This case study of the agricultural school in the town of Sidi-Bel-Abbès, former headquarters of the French Foreign Legion, discusses post-independent Algerian responses to return visits, claims, and writings by settlers.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023-11-17
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingEdinburgh University Press eBooks · 2023-11-17
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Muslim World Day Parade and “Storefront” Mosques of New York City
University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Geography
- Art
- Visual arts
Frequent coauthors
- 50 shared
Jon P. Anderson
LI-COR Biosciences (United States)
- 50 shared
Ellen-Fairbanks Bodman
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
- 49 shared
William Ochsenwald
Virginia Tech
- 39 shared
Ragui Assaad
University of Minnesota
- 39 shared
John P. Entelis
Fordham University
- 38 shared
Fred H. Lawson
Mills College
- 36 shared
Jerrold Green
University of America
- 30 shared
William O Beeman
Twin Cities Orthopedics
Education
- 1994
Ph.D., Anthropology
University of Chicago
- 1991
M.A., Anthropology
University of Chicago
- 1988
B.A., Anthropology
University of California, Los Angeles
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