Jonas Tinius - about - JONAS TINIUS

Jonas Tinius is an anthropologist of art, theatre, and heritage. His research explores contemporary artistic production in public cultural institutions in Germany and Europe today, with a focus on issues of identity and alterity in time of European postcolonial reckoning. He studied and completed his PhD as a William Wyse Scholar in Social Anthropology at King’s College, University of Cambridge (UK) after undergraduate studies in social anthropology, archaeology, and British and American Studies at the Universities of Cambridge and Münster (Germany). During his PhD, he was predoctoral research fellow at the theatre studies collection at Schloss Wahn, directed by Prof Peter W. Marx at the University of Cologne. In 2013, he co-founded (with Clare Foster) the Mellon/Newton Foundation-funded Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH), which has become its longest running research network. From 2016-2020, he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Institute of European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, funded as part of Sharon Macdonald's Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. As part of his research, he collaborated with artists and curators of art spaces and galleries in Berlin (among them SAVVY Contemporary, the ifa-gallery and the Wedding district gallery) to study and think about curatorial practices as forms of troubling of national, universal, and hegemonic narratives, especially against the backdrop of major museum transformations such as the Humboldt Forum. In 2017, he co-founded (with Prof Roger Sansi) the Anthropology and the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). He is research coordinator and co-founder of the Post-Heimat Network on migrant theatre and art, funded by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Cultural Foundation) and founding member of the art, research, and theatre collective Ruhrorter. He is currently Scientific Coordinator and Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the European Research Council Consolidator Grant Project Minor Universality: Narrative World Production After Western Universalism led by Prof Markus Messling (2019-2024). He is editor of Anthropology, Theatre, and Development: The Transformative Potential of Performance (Palgrave, 2015, with Alex Flynn), Otherwise. Rethinking Museums and Heritage(CARMAH, 2018), and Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and Cultural Heritage (Leuven University Press, 2020, with Margareta von Oswald). He has also edited a 1300-page long book on the work of Roberto Ciulli and the Theater an der Ruhr, entitled Der fremde Blick (Alexander Verlag, Berlin, 2020).