Congratulations to Fiori Sara Berhane, Winner of the 2024-2025 Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences!
The School for Advanced Research (SAR), in Santa Fe, New Mexico, administers the Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and Black Experiences in collaboration with the Foundation. The purpose of this fellowship is to expand the anthropological conversation and build capacity in anthropology as a career and field of study, amplifying perspectives previously underrepresented in the discipline. This year's winner is Fiori Sara Berhane, for her project, "Prisoners of Our Dreams: Eritrean Diaspora Politics in ‘Red’ Italy."
Fiori Berhane, PhD is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology at the University of Southern California. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist whose research interests span Global Black studies, critical refugee and border studies, and the anthropology of Europe. Her current book project, Prisoners of Our Dreams is a multi-sited ethnography of refugee political activism situated in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy. Drawing on over 20 months of fieldwork, the manuscript engages in an analysis of both transformations in Eritrean state power and Italy’s migration regimes from the 1970s to the present. By considering two distinct historical conjunctures—the hegemony of the Italian Communist Party during the 1970s and Italy’s recent descent as a laboratory for the radical right—Dr. Berhane demonstrates that Eritrean migrations to Italy have been inextricably enfolded in larger questions over the meaning of the colonial past, the transformation from state socialism to neoliberalism globally, and racial nationalism. Her work has been published in Cultural Anthropology (forthcoming), Anthropology Now, Africa is a Country and Lavoro Culturale and has been supported by the Wenner Gren foundation, the Fulbright IIE and the American Academy in Rome. She is a member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary group of scholars who center refugee epistemologies in their scholarly and collaborative work with and on refugee communities. Dr. Berhane teaches courses in Global Black studies and Anthropology, and she received her PhD in 2021 from the Department of Anthropology at Brown University.