Description of research and teaching

Dr Victoria Soyan Peemot is a researcher, community advocate, and member of the Soyan kinship group from the Tyva Republic, raised at the Tyvan-Mongolian borderland in a livestock herding family. Her research weaves together Tyva transnational kinship, multispecies relations, and the continuity of pastoralist lifeways and is guided by aaldaar, the Tyvan customary practice of relational reciprocity that extends to land and other-than-human beings. She holds a PhD in History and Cultural Heritage Studies from the University of Helsinki (2021). Her book The Horse In My Blood (2024) explores human-horse-homeland relationships and histories of state violence. Her second book Songs of Tyva: A Guide to Tyvan Culture and Language (2026) draws on emplaced storytelling through folk songs and photographs of the featured landscapes. Her broader work engages ethnographic museum collections across Europe, decolonial archiving, and the return of ancestral stories to the communities they belong to. She actively supports Tyvan scholars and community voices in international academic spaces, edits and translates Tyvan scholarship for global audiences, and hosts the Tyvan-language podcast, connecting communities with their heritage in European archives and museums. Her international affiliations include Tohoku University (visiting postdoctoral researcher and continuing research affiliate) and the Hokkaido Museum of Northern Peoples (cooperator), alongside academic collaborations with scholars from Canada, Lithuania, Sweden, and Australia. She serves on editorial boards of academic journals and as a reviewer for academic publishers and international research funding committees.

Research interests

Indigenous Research Methodologies, Indigenous Languages, Museum Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Visual Anthropology, Border Studies, History of Knowledge, Inner Asia, North Asia.

Education information

2015 - 2021 PhD in History and Cultural Heritage Studies, University of Helsinki.