Victoria Soyan Peemot

Dr. Victoria Soyan Peemot is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is a Tyva scholar and a native speaker of the Turkic-Tyvan language. She obtained a PhD in History and Cultural Heritage Studies from the University of Helsinki in 2021. Her research interests include Indigenous research methodologies, more-than-human relationships, environmental linguistics, border studies, museum anthropology, and the history of science (Finnish research expeditions to Inner Asia, archives and museum collections originating in IA). She actively collaborates with scholars working on multispecies sensory communication (Sensory Acts project, University of Regina), crafting techniques of reindeer herders (Lithuanian Institute of History), and human-equine relationships (Mongolia Institute, Australian National University). Her academic monograph, The Horse in My Blood: More-than-Human Kinship in the Altai and Sayan Mountains (Berghahn Books, 2024), examines the post-socialist identity negotiations of Inner Asian pastoralists, their horses, and homelands. Her latest book, Songs of Tyva: A Guide to Tyvan Culture and Language (Suomen Kurkkulaulajat ry, 2026), draws on emplaced storytelling through folk songs and photographs of the featured landscapes. The book benefits from Victoria’s long-term volunteer work organizing international music events in both Tyva and Finland, her experience in translation, and her ongoing collaborations with pastoralists, subsistence hunters, and musicians across the transnational Inner Asian region. Victoria is a member of the editorial advisory board of the academic journal Sibirica: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies and a general editor in sociocultural anthropology for the Journal of Hunter-Gatherer Research.