Centre for Kurdish Studies

Research interests

Several areas of research interest are explored at the Centre for Kurdish Studies:

The Yezidis

Current research interests include an initiative to build a Yezidi ethnographic museum in the Aparan region of Armenia, and planning a collaborative project involving various partners in Europe and in Turkey that will generate new and much needed data on the position of the Kurdish language in Turkey. The project also intends to establish a digital archive, based in Exeter but accessible worldwide, for Kurdish materials, especially linguistic and folkloric data, in cooperation with existing archives in Europe, and, we hope, in Kurdistan.

Research on the Yezidis is led by Professor Christine Allison. She is also continuing to work on collective memory and, with Professor Philip Kreyenbroek of Goettingen, she is co-editing a book on memory in Iranian cultures. In preparation is an ongoing book on discourses of memory amongst the Kurds, and she is currently also writing a more general book on Kurdish culture.

Relationships between minority and majority fields of cultural production

This research focuses on the relationships between minority/majority fields of cultural production and on the process of integration of the minority cultural field within the national field of culture with a specific focus on Kurdish culture in Turkey. A further field of interest is languages policy, literature and media and is currently writing a paper on the issue of heritage policy in Diyarbakir and another paper on representation of the minorities in Turkish soap operas.

This research is led by Dr Clémence Scalbert Yücel.

The Yaresan/Ahl-i Haqq

The Yaresan/Ahl-i Haqq are a non-Muslim culture based in Western Iran. Most of the Yaresan are Kurdish-speaking, but there is also an Azeri Turkish-speaking part of the community. The Yaresan’s main religious and social codes are contained in, and conveyed through, music (ritual music in particular). The research explores this primordial importance of the musical sound in Yaresan communal self-perception. Also explored are the (sometimes strong – though often ignored) relations of the Yaresan with other religions or ‘heterodoxies’ of the larger region, such as the Yezidi, the Kaka’i, the Kizilbash, and the Bektashi.

Yiannis Kanakis leads this research. He is currently collaborating with Professor Philip Kreyenbroek (director of the Iranian Studies Institute, Georg-August University, Göttingen) on the writing of a book on the Yaresan/Ahl-i Haqq.

Kurdish literature

The research explores the Kurdish literature and its policy on the formation of Kurdish identity and subjectivity. This research is led by Dr Hashem Ahmadzadeh who has published many articles on various aspects of the Kurdish novel in representing Kurdish nationalism and identity. He is now working on a project about the historiography of Kurdish literature aiming at compiling a book on the history of Kurdish literature. Other areas of his research interest are Persian literature, culture and politics; nation building in the Middle East, democratisation and the ethnic question in the Middle East.

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq

This research area covers the status of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, and its interactions with regional powers. The research focuses upon Iraq’s ‘disputed internal boundary’, and particularly in the applying of federal models and the complications brought by resource competition.

This research is led by Professor Gareth Stansfield. His most recent work is Crisis in Kirkuk: The Ethnopolitics of Conflict and Compromise (with Liam Anderson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), and his Kurdish Policy Imperative (with Robert Lowe, Chatham House and Brookings Institution, 2010) is about to be published.

Women’s mental health in post-conflict Iraq

This project, funded by a grant from the British Academy, is an examination of women’s mental health in post-conflict Iraq, and particularly diagnosis and treatment of female hysteria in Kurdistan Region. This latter topic will be the focus of an ethnographic documentary film. The film will examine the issue of female hysteria in relation to women’s agency and changing gender roles in Kurdish society in the context of post-conflict modernity. The project forms part of ongoing research in residual violence, trauma and health and illness in post-conflict societies.

This research is led by Dr Sarah Keeler. She has presented the preliminary finds of this research at conferences in Europe, and as part of the Post-Conflict Environments Project coordinated by the Woodrow Wilson International Studies Center in Washington DC.