I am a socio-cultural anthropologist and director of the Berlin-Brandenburg Office for Everyday Culture at the Institute for European Ethnology of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. I studied studied social anthropology at the University of Cambridge, where I also completed a PhD on German theatre, migration, and Haltung. Subsequently, I held a post-doctoral research fellowship in the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and was scientific coordinator and postdoctoral researcher in cultural anthropology in the ERC project Minor Universality at Saarland University. I have held visiting research and teaching posts at the Universität zu Köln, the University of California, Los Angeles, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute, and the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan.
For the past decade, my research has grappled with public cultural production in Europe, focusing specifically on public and civic institutions, such as theatres, galleries, and museums. I consider such institutions as prisms of public culture through which societies reckon with difficult pasts that break into the present and seek to prefigure hopeful futures. Through my research, teaching, public engagement, curation, and writing, I seek to create modes of co-production, co-curation, co-performance, which reflect on the ways in which academic, including anthropological, knowledge production is embroiled in the same quest for understanding and producing contested ideas of world. To this end, I co-founded and co-convened different networks, such as the Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and the Anthropology & the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). I also collaborated with the research, theatre, and exhibition project Ruhrorter at the Theater an der Ruhr and co-founded the theatre and migration production network Post-Heimat, funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Since 2024, I am part of the new convening team of the colleex collaboratory network for ethnographic experimentation of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and have joined the executive committee of the association as its Secretary from 2025 onwards.
I am currently completing my second book manuscript, tentatively titled Beyond the Universal Machine. Curating Difficult Heritage Spectres, which will appear in open-access format in the book series Beyond Universalism / Partager l'universel by de Gruyter. This book analyses and documents curatorial practices that challenge the universalising structures and forms of cultural governance of the European universal museum. It focuses on ethnographic work with activists, artists, and curators in Berlin, Milan, and Marseille. My first monograph State of the Arts. An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration was published with Cambridge University Press (2023) and analyses forms of political self-cultivation, national patronage, and cultural production through theatre in the postindustrial Ruhrvalley. It brings together over ten years of collaborative research with one of the pioneering (post)migrant theatres, the Theater an der Ruhr, its founder, clown, actor, and director Roberto Ciulli, as well as the independent theatre group Ruhrorter founded by actor and director Adem Köstereli.
For the past decade, my research has grappled with public cultural production in Europe, focusing specifically on public and civic institutions, such as theatres, galleries, and museums. I consider such institutions as prisms of public culture through which societies reckon with difficult pasts that break into the present and seek to prefigure hopeful futures. Through my research, teaching, public engagement, curation, and writing, I seek to create modes of co-production, co-curation, co-performance, which reflect on the ways in which academic, including anthropological, knowledge production is embroiled in the same quest for understanding and producing contested ideas of world. To this end, I co-founded and co-convened different networks, such as the Interdisciplinary Performance Network at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge and the Anthropology & the Arts Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA). I also collaborated with the research, theatre, and exhibition project Ruhrorter at the Theater an der Ruhr and co-founded the theatre and migration production network Post-Heimat, funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Since 2024, I am part of the new convening team of the colleex collaboratory network for ethnographic experimentation of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and have joined the executive committee of the association as its Secretary from 2025 onwards.
I am currently completing my second book manuscript, tentatively titled Beyond the Universal Machine. Curating Difficult Heritage Spectres, which will appear in open-access format in the book series Beyond Universalism / Partager l'universel by de Gruyter. This book analyses and documents curatorial practices that challenge the universalising structures and forms of cultural governance of the European universal museum. It focuses on ethnographic work with activists, artists, and curators in Berlin, Milan, and Marseille. My first monograph State of the Arts. An Ethnography of German Theatre and Migration was published with Cambridge University Press (2023) and analyses forms of political self-cultivation, national patronage, and cultural production through theatre in the postindustrial Ruhrvalley. It brings together over ten years of collaborative research with one of the pioneering (post)migrant theatres, the Theater an der Ruhr, its founder, clown, actor, and director Roberto Ciulli, as well as the independent theatre group Ruhrorter founded by actor and director Adem Köstereli.