Moslem Ghomashlouyan is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies and at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg’s Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Research Network (IFN) at the University of Bern. 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 explores the social lives of (informal) trade and cryptocurrencies as they relate to economic life and transnational circulation of goods and currencies in and around sanctioned Iran.
Moslem earned his PhD in Social Anthropology (summa cum laude) from the University of Bern in 2025, where his dissertation, based 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. His dissertation received the University of Bern Faculty of Humanities’ award for the best doctoral thesis of the academic year 2024/25.
Moslem 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.
Moslem previously held a visiting fellowship at New York University's Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (2023–2024).
