Anne-marie Misconi

Anne-Marie graduated with a BA Hons in Arab Studies from Exeter University, specialising in comparative culture, religion and society with Dr. Ian R. Netton and Prof. Aziz al-Azmeh. She then spent a year in Baghdad, learning Classical Arabic at Mustansiriyah University. On returning to London, she researched and wrote about developing economies for Asian regional economic associations which led to three years in Singapore as an editor and communications strategist and a 15-year career in public relations. Following the destruction of the historic Iraqi city of Mosul, Anne-Marie began consulting private family archives to research the social and intellectual histories of Iraq. In 2019, she assisted at the Jews of Iraq conference, a collaboration between the SOAS Department of History, Religions and Philosophies, the University of Chicago’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies and the British Institute for the Study of Iraq (BISI). She earnt her MPhil from SOAS in 2020 and is due to complete her doctoral thesis in 2024. Anne-Marie continues to study Arabic and has been awarded funding from SOAS Language Acquisitions Fund. She is a member of BISI and was appointed its Visiting Scholars Coordinator in 2022. 

The written histories of Iraq have tended to be political histories, relying on British Government archives and the memoirs of political and military actors. Meanwhile, the progress of modern research into Iraq’s multi-ethnic, multi-religious society has been hampered by lack of access to archives as well as by destruction of its material heritage. I take an interdisciplinary approach to bring to the fore the voices of Iraq’s people, making use of evidence produced and preserved between the end of the Ottoman era and the beginning of the Ba‘athist period.

Jews of Iraq Conference