Bio

Field: Anthropology
Interests: Foodways, Islam, Kinship and Relatedness, Religion
In Residence: Fall 2014 - Summer 2017

Dr. Wellman is an anthropologist who specializes in Iran and the Middle East. Between 2007 and 2010, she conducted 15 months of ethnographic research in the Islamic Republic, including 10 months in a small town outside of Shiraz. The result is her forthcoming book, Feeding Iran: Shi’i Families and the Making of an Islamic Republic, which examines the lives of rural families with ties to the Islamic Revolution and Iran-Iraq War. It adapts the anthropology of kinship, ethics, religion and food to explore how people create convincing concordances between the intimacies of family life and the grand rituals of state power. Dr. Wellman is the co-editor, with Dr. Todne Thomas and Dr. Asiya Malik, of New Directions of Spiritual Kinship: Sacred Ties across the Abrahamic Religions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She joined the faculty of anthropology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in the Fall of 2017. While at Princeton, she organized the international conference: "Ethnography of Iran: Past and Present."