Dr Gabriele vom Bruck

Gabriele vom Bruck received her university education at the London School of Economics from where she received a DPhil. 

She taught at the L.S.E. and the University of Edinburgh before joining SOAS in 2005. She has held visiting fellowship in Paris, Berlin and Princeton. She has conducted extensive field research in the Republic of Yemen. One of her major studies, Ruling Families in Transition: Islam, Memory, and Morality in Yemen (2005), analyses the ambivalent ways in which the ruling elite of the Yemeni Imamate, which had enjoyed exclusive rights to the leadership for about a millennium, was incorporated into the republic in the aftermath of the 1962 revolution. 

Her latest monograph, Mirrored Loss: A Yemeni Woman's Life Story (2019), tells the story of Amat al-Latif al Wazir, only daughter of 'Abdullah al-Wazir, the leader of Yemen's constitutional movement of the mid-twentieth century for reform of the autocratic imamate. The movement culminated in a failed revolt which led to the family's downfall. The study explores how violence translates into tragedy in the personal realm, and how individual lives and larger cultural and political worlds intersect in Yemen. Gabriele vom Bruck’s current research project looks at the nature of photographs as relational objects in the making and enunciating of personal histories, seeking to understand the relationship between memory and the materiality of the image.