Zsuzsanna Ihar

Zsuzsanna Ihar is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge. She is the recipient of a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and a member of the research project “From Collection to Cultivation”—a Wellcome-funded research initiative led by Prof. Helen Anne Curry. Since 2023, Ihar has also convened the research network “Military Surplus: Toxicity, Industry and War,” funded by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), with Dr. Layla Renshaw, Prof. Paola Filippucci, and Jo Sweeney, collating the remnants, residues, particles, and molecules of the military-industrial-complex (MIC). She was previously a Knowledge Management Fellow at the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), and a Research Fellow at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Her current research is situated at the intersection of critical military studies, the history of science, and rural anthropology. She is interested in rural communities and their interactions, entanglements, and exchanges with the military-industrial complex, in addition to forms of rural anti-militarism and activism. Through conducting both archival and ethnographic research in the Scottish Hebrides, her dissertation examines an array of different military experiments, infrastructures, and initiatives which shaped—and continue to shape—the archipelago and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Alongside examining the material, epistemic, and affective elements of militarization, Ihar is also keen to develop a method of collaboratively reading, contextualizing, and critiquing (declassified) military documents with communities and individuals impacted by the UK’s MIC. She is currently working on her first poetry chapbook and a short film exploring Gaelic Realism.

RCC Research Project: Missiles over the Machair: A Study of the Scottish Hebrides and its Militarization (1940–2024)

Selected Publications:

• “Omenic Missiles, Cold War Specters.” In Beyond Bios, edited by Sophie Chao, Christine Winters, and David Schlosberg. Duke University Press, forthcoming.
• “Spectral Sonics: Field Recordings from an Extractive Zone.” Special issue, American Anthropologist (forthcoming).
• “Properties of War: The Militarization of Housing Policy and Urban Planning in Contemporary Azerbaijan.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience 9, no. 1 (2023). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v9i1.39527.
• “Multispecies Mediations in a Post-Extractive Zone.” In The Promise of Multispecies Justice, edited by Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey. Duke University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478023524-013.
• Review of What Comes after Entanglement?: Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion, by Eva Haifa Giraud. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 8, no. 1 (2022). https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v8i1.37278.