SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Marieke Brandt is a senior researcher at the ISA, with a primary focus on socio-cultural processes and social history in Yemen and Southwest Arabia. She has dedicated five years of her life to living in Yemen, conducting extensive research. She has received various fellowships, including from the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) fellowship in Yemen, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) fellowship from the European Union. She has been the Principal Investigator of the New Frontiers Groups Programme (NFG) project titled “Deciphering Local Power Politics in Northern Yemen.” Her first monograph, Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2017) is an award-winning work that explores the evolution and local complexities of Yemen’s Houthi (Ansar Allah) conflict. Her second book The Tale of a Feud: Domination, Resistance, and Agency in Highland Yemen, published in Open Access by Brill in 2023,is a biography at the interface between anthropology and political history that reconstructs recent Yemeni history from the vantage point of those who were in constant opposition to the Salih regime. Her research has been published in prestigious journals, including Anthropos, Journal of Arabian Studies, Anthropology of the Middle East, International Journal for Middle East Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Medieval Worlds.
Marieke is a scholar with a severe disability (deafness).
MAIN RESEARCH AREAS
- Socio-cultural processes and social history in Yemen and Southwest Arabia
- Ethnicity, genealogy, and kinship
- Tribalism, tribe-state relation and governance
- Anthropology of customary law, mediation, and conflict
- Memory, biography, and life-writing
- Digital anthropology and the ontology of ethnographic archives
PROJEKTE (LEITERIN)
- Digitization of Walter Dostal’s Visual Legacy
- Tribalism, religious radicalization, fossil energy, and the state: Deciphering local power politics in Yemen’s frontier provinces Saʿda and al-Jawf (concluded)
- Shifting Loyalties: The Tribes of Khawlan b. Amir in the Houthi Conflict in North-West Yemen (concluded)
PROJEKTE (MITARBEIT)
- Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire in Christianity, Islam and Buddhism (400-1600 CE) – VISCOM
- Global Eurasia
Selected publications
Selected publications
- The Tale of a Feud: Domination, Resistance, and Agency in Highland Yemen, Leiden 2023: Brill (Open Access).
- “A stray bullet from the seventh century hit Yemen”: Anti-Zaydi polemics and the politics of genealogy in al-Ghobari’s Al-Qabīlah al-Hāshimiyyah.” Leiden Arabic Humanities Blog, 9 June 2023.
- with Alexander Weissenburger: “Ḥūthīs (Houthis)”, in Farhad Daftary and Wilferd Madelung (eds.), Encyclopaedia Islamica, Boston/Leiden: Brill (forthcoming).
- Tribes in Modern Yemen: An Anthology, ed. Marieke Brandt, Vienna 2021: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, doi: 10.1553/978OEAW86199.
- “Some Remarks on Blood Vengeance (thaʾr) in Contemporary Yemen”, in Marieke Brandt (ed.), Tribes in Modern Yemen: An Anthology, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, pp. 63-78, doi: 10.1553/978OEAW86199.
- “A Tribe and Its States: Yemen’s 1972 Bayḥān Massacre Revisited”, Middle Eastern Studies, 55: 3, 2019, pp. 319-338, doi: 10.1080/00263206.2018.1540415.
- Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict, London/New York 2017: Hurst/Oxford University Press, doi: 10.1093/oso/9780190673598.001.0001.
- “The Global and the Local: Al-Qaeda and Yemen’s Tribes”, in Olivier Roy and Virginie Collombier (eds.), Tribes and Global Jihadism, London 2017: Hurst/Oxford University Press, pp. 105-130.
- “Delocalization of Fieldwork and (Re)Construction of Place: Doing Ethnography in Wartime Yemen”, International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) 49/3, 2017, pp. 506-510, doi: 10.1017/S0020743817000368.
- “Heroic History, Disruptive Genealogy: Al-Ḥasan al-Hamdānī and the Historical Formation of the Shākir Tribe (Wāʾilah and Dahm) in al-Jawf, Yemen”, Medieval Worlds 3, 2016, pp. 116-145, doi: 10.1553/medievalworlds_no3_2016s116.
- “Inhabiting Tribal Structures: Leadership Hierarchies in Tribal Upper Yemen (Hamdān & Khawlān b. ʿĀmir)”, in Andre Gingrich and Siegfried Haas (eds.), Southwest Arabia across History: Essays to the Memory of Walter Dostal, pp. 91-116, Vienna 2014: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, doi: 10.1553/0x00321746.