Cambridge Professor of Anthropology among new Fellows of the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Professor Yael Navaro has been elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in recognition of her outstanding achievements.


She is among 92 distinguished scholars to be elected to the prestigious Fellowship for 2025, in fields ranging from the study of 20th-century music to the neuroscience of memory, language, and cognition.


“I feel truly honoured to be elected a Fellow of the British Academy," she said. "It couldn't be a more important time to mobilise the social sciences and humanities to address some of the most critical issues of our era."

Yael Navaro is currently Professor of Social, Political and Psychological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Social Anthropology at Newnham College. She is a social anthropologist who specialises in the study of politics, the state, and political violence and its aftermaths. She has contributed to crafting a distinctively affective, spatial and material approach for the study of postwar environments, embedding social, political, and psychological anthropology through new methodologies. 

Regionally, her work has focused on social and political life in Turkey and Cyprus, and she has a dedicated ongoing interest in ethnographically studying politics and the aftermath of mass violence in the everyday of the region. She has conducted long-term anthropological fieldwork in Istanbul, Cyprus and Antakya. Her publications, research collaborations, and teaching also explore the politics of ethnographic and archival research, dealing with issues of representation and erasure.

Professor Navaro has been writing a book based on long-term fieldwork on inter-communal relations in post-2012 Antakya, Turkey. Her further current work explores more-than-human worlds in the aftermath of catastrophe, focusing especially on the earthquake that hit the city of Antakya in 2023, and connecting her research interests in the anthropology of politics with environmental anthropology.

She has given several named and keynote lectures including the Malinowski Memorial Lecture (London School of Economics, 2007), the Marett Memorial Lecture (Oxford, 2023), and the Berndt Lambert Memorial Lecture (Cornell, 2025), among others.


Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences. It is a Fellowship consisting of over 1700 of the leading minds in these subjects from the UK and overseas. 


Professor Navaro is among 12 Cambridge academics awarded a Fellowship in 2025.