Scott MacLochlainn is a sociocultural anthropologist, with a geographic focus on the Philippines and the United States. His research examines the contemporary and historical intersections of religion and law, and the semiotic translation of religious identities across linguistic, economic, and regulatory domains. In particular, his work focuses on the history and expansion of corporations and their religious and ethical identities. Since July 2018 he is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at MPI-MMG, where be began a new project on the hyper-mediatization and increasingly fraught legal and social spaces of death in the Philippines.
Matthew Carey is assistant professor in anhropology at Copenhagen University, and his main thrust of research revolves around Tachelhit-Berber speaking communities in Southern Morocco. His PhD at the University of Cambridge focused on questions of political organisation, institutionality and anarchism, and his postdoctoral research explored subjectivity, intimacy and emotions in the Moroccan High Atlas. His recent work has focused on mistrust and lying (Mistrust. An Ethnographic Theory, University of Chicago Press, 2017).
Peter Pels (1958) is Professor in the Sociology and Anthropology of Africa at the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of the University of Leiden since 2003. He graduated in social anthropology at the University of Amsterdam on a study of Catholicism in East Africa (1993), and worked there at the Research Centre Religion and Society between 1995 and 2003. He published on religion and politics under colonialism, the history of anthropology, the anthropology of magic, social science ethics, visual and material culture, archaeology and science fiction. He was the editor-in-chief of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale, the journal of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, from 2003 until 2007. Between 2006 and 2015 he was an advisor to the Çatalhöyük Research Project led by Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder. He is currently interested in questions of race, culture and decolonization as they pertain to museums and heritage.
Samuel Williams is a Research Fellow in the Max Planck-Cambridge Centre for Ethics, Economy, and Social Change, and he is based at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. His research examines interesections between economy and material culture in Turkey, and he has a particular interest in the ethnographic study of markets and marketplaces. He has conducted fieldwork over the last decade on contemporary commerce in two historic Istanbul marketplaces ––the Grand Bazaar and Istiklal Street–– and his current multi-sited field research explores the traffic in gold between Europe and the Middle East. Trained in social anthropology at the University of Sydney and Princeton University, he has held prior appointments as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Musée du Quai Branly–Jacques Chirac and as Andrew W Mellon Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Susan Bayly (M.A., Ph.D. University of Cambridge) is Professor of Historical Anthropology and Director of Graduate Education in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology. She is a past editor of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute and former Associate Editor of Cambridge Anthropology. She has held visiting appointments in the USA, India, France and Singapore. She is adviser to a number of museums and other institutions in Vietnam, including the Vietnam Centre for Research & Promotion of Cultural Heritage. Her publications include Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age. Vietnam, India and Beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Her current research is on aspects of marketisation experience in contemporary Vietnam, though she retains a longstanding interest in the Indian subcontinent. She recently completed a study of conceptions of achievement and success in contemporary Vietnam funded by the UK ESRC, and is currently combining the perspectives of visual anthropology and the anthropology of morality and ethics in a project on how official and personal images are deployed and perceived in variety of present-day Hanoi contexts.
Tabea Häberlein holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the Bayreuth International Graduate School for African Studies (BIGSAS), Bayreuth University. She currently works as a research associate at the Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Bayreuth in the DFG-funded research project “Inner family resource flows and intergenerational relationships in West Africa” Her main fields of interest cover intergenerational relationships, age class systems, lifecourse, age and ageing.
Wang Hui, Distinguished Professor of literature and history at Tsinghua University, Changjiang Scholar, Director of Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences. He achieved his Ph.D in 1988 at Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. From 1996 to 2007, he served as the co-editor of Dushu magazine and organized a series of significant intellectual debates in China. In 2002, he moved to Tsinghua University. His fields are Chinese intellectual history, modern Chinese literature and social theory etc. His publications include The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (four volumes), The Depolitized Politics, “Tibetan Question” between East and West, From Asian Perspective: Narrations of Chinese History, The Short Twentieth Century: Chinese Revolution and the Logic of Politics tc. Many of his works have been translated into different languages including China’s New Order, The End of the Revolution, The Politics of Imagining Asia and China from Empire to Nation-State: China’s Twentieth Century etc. He is the winner of “2013 Luca Pacioli Prize” and “2018 Anneliese Maier Research Award”.
Antonius C.G.M. Robben is Professor of Anthropology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and past President of the Netherlands Society of Anthropology. He received a Ph.D. (1986) from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been a research fellow at the Michigan Society of Fellows, Ann Arbor, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, New York, and the David Rockefeller Center, Harvard University. His monographs include Political Violence and Trauma in Argentina (2005), which won the Textor Prize from the American Anthropological Association in 2006 for Excellence in Anthropology, and Argentina Betrayed: Memory, Mourning, and Accountability (2018). His most recent edited volumes are Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhumations in the Age of Human Rights (2015; co-edited with Francisco Ferrándiz), Death, Mourning, and Burial: A Cross-Cultural Reader (2017, 2nd ed.), and A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (2018).
Jakob Gross studied cultural anthropology, psychology and religious studies. He taught at the film school Macromedia and has published an article on ‘The habitus of the documentary field’. He worked for Documentary Campus Master School and DOK.fest Munich film festival. As an associate member of the Cluster of Excellence of Heidelberg University he worked on new forms of representation in visual anthropology. Since 2008 he has been producing his own documentary films and has been working as a cinematographer.
Annika Mayer studied visual anthropology, political sciences and new German literature in Munich and Paris. After her studies, she worked as scientific assistant at the Institute for Indology and Anthropology at the LMU Munich. In 2017 she completed her PhD on ageing in the Indian middle-classes at Heidelberg University. Since 2013 Annika has been working as an editor, director and producer. She is currently pursuing her Master in film editing at the Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf.
Jeremy F. Walton is the leader of the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity (MPI-MMG) in Göttingen, Germany. Prior to his current position, he held research and teaching fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and New York University’s Religious Studies Program. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2009. Dr. Walton’s first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnographic exploration of the relationship among Muslim civil society organizations, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey. He has published his research in a wide selection of scholarly journals, including American Ethnologist, Sociology of Islam, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, and Die Welt des Islams. “Empires of Memory,” which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on the cultural politics of post-imperial memory and history in eight former Habsburg and Ottoman cities: Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste, Thessaloniki, Zagreb, and Belgrade. His research in the context of “Empires of Memory” examines the ambivalent legacies and modes of amnesia that emerge from specific sites of memory in each of these cities.