Associate Professor
Joint appointment Islamic Studies/Anthroplogy
Setrag Manoukian is an anthropologist interested in knowledge and its relationship with power, understood both as existential and social force. He approaches cities, poems, videos and other technologies as forms of knowledge with specific existential trajectories and attends to their historicity. His area of speciality is Iran. He is looking for ways to pursue Giambattista Vico’s combination of anthropology and philology.
Research Interests
Knowledge; historicity; ethnography of texts; semiotics; critical theory; technology; poetry; power; anthropology and history of Iran.
Representative Publications
Books
___. 2012. City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History, and Poetry. Routledge Publishers, London.
___.1991. L'Argento di un Povero Cuore: Centouno Ghazal di Sa‘dî Shirâzî [the Silver of a Poor Heart: a Hundred and One Ghazals of Sa‘dî Shirazi]. Roma: Cultural Institute of Iran 273 pp. (Reviewed in the journal Iranian Studies 32.1 by Richard Davis).
Edited Books
___. 2003. S. Manoukian ed. Etno-grafie: testi oggetti immagini [Ethno-graphies: Texts, Objects, Images], Roma, Meltemi.
___. 2002. A. Bellagamba and S. Manoukian eds. Colonialismo a thematic issue of the yearbook Annuario Antropologia, Roma, Meltemi.
___. 1992. S. Manoukian and R. Zipoli. Sa‘di: Concordance and Repertoires of 1000 Lines. Venezia: Poligrafo. [Statistic repertoires of 1000 lines from Sa‘di’s ghazals.
___. 1988. S. Manoukian and H. Vahramian eds. Gharabagh: Documenti. [collection of articles on the history of the Gharabagh region].
Articles and Chapters
___. 2019 a. “Thinking with the Impersonal: An Ethnographic View From Iran.” In Antropologia. 6, n.1 N/S 199-215.
___. 2019 b. “Ordinary Matters in Islamic Studies: Notes from the Field.” In ReOrient. 5(1): 6-24.
___. 2017. A Vocabulary for the Impersonal: a Notebook from Shiraz." in Manifestos for World Thought Lucian Stone and Jason Mohaghegh editors, Rowman and Littlefield: London, New York. Pp. 155-169.
___. 2013a. “The Ruins of Shiraz: History Memory and Forgetting in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” in Remembering the Past in Iranian Cultures. C. Allison and Philip Kreyenbroek eds. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden.
___. 2013b. “The Ruins of the Others: History and Modernity in Iran” In Modernity’s Classics. S.H. Humphreys and R.G. Wagner eds. Springer, Heidelberg.
___. 2011a. “Two Forms of Temporality in Contemporary Iran” in Sociologica. 3, 1-17.
___. 2011b. “Wanderings Beyond Codification and Desire,” in Anthrohistory. Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline. Edward Murphy, Chandra D. Bhimull, Fernando Coronil, Monica Eileen Patterson and Julie Skurski eds. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
___. 2010. “Where is this Place? Crowds, Audio-Vision and Poetry in Postelection Iran.” Public Culture 22. 2: 237-263.
___. 2006a. “Cose di Casa: Modalità di Esposizione e Costruzione dei Sessi a Shiraz” [Things at Home: Display and the Construction of Sex in Shiraz] Quaderni del Cream. Milano, 133-168.
___. 2005a. “Pane, Popolo e Inglesi: forme di dominio a Shiraz nel 1917” [Bread, People and the British: forms of domination in Shiraz 1917] in La dipendenza: antropologia delle relazioni di dominio, P.G. Solinas ed. Lecce, Argo. 205-230.
