Dr des. Moslem Ghomashlouyan is a scientific assistant and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies. His academic work spans the anthropology of mobility, borders, and territorialization, focusing on the Middle East. Moslem's research interests center on the socio-economic dynamics of contraband commerce, the politics of migration and gendered mobilities, and the governance of cross-border flows. His current research investigates how economic informality, cryptocurrencies, and smuggling become embedded in state and transregional economic practices in and around sanctioned Iran, focusing on how trade and financial actors develop informal networks that challenge the territorial constraints imposed by sanctions.
Moslem earned his PhD in Social Anthropology (summa cum laude) from the University of Bern in 2025, where his dissertation, drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Kurdistan and beyond, explored gendered mobilities, including contraband commerce and migration, in a Kurdish village in the Iran-Iraq border region. He received his Master’s degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology (with Distinction) from Central European University in 2019 and another Master’s in Sociology from the University of Tehran in 2018, where he also completed his undergraduate studies in Social Sciences/Research in 2015.
He was recently awarded a Walter Benjamin Junior Fellowship at the University of Bern (2025) and previously held a visiting research position at New York University's Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (2023–2024).
