C.V. | Current Project | Publications
Research Interests
Non-Religion, Party Politics, Convictions, Aspirations, Secularism, Activism, Anthropology of the State, Normativity, Economic Anthropology
Research Area(s)
Bangladesh, South Asia, Europe
Departmental Activities
Working Group: Political Assembly
Profile
I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of ‘Anthropology of Politics and Governance’ at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle and the ECR project "Religion and Its Others in South Asia and the World (ROSA)". I have recently submitted my PhD thesis at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK-Ethnologie), University of Zurich. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork in urban Sylhet (Bangladesh), the thesis discusses how shifting positionalities towards secularism and (non)religious struggles intersect with various forms of politics (among them notably party politics), moral orders, and social imaginations. I am also interested in economic and political anthropology and have recently co-edited a special issue on "Ethnographic Perspectives on the State in Bangladesh".
Before joining the Max Planck Institute, I held positions as a lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Zurich (2015–2019 with interruptions), a junior fellow at the Advanced Centre of Humanities and Social Science "Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities" in Leipzig (2017/2018), and a visiting PhD research student at the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2018/2019). I studied Social Anthropology, South Asia Studies, Japanese, Global Studies, and Economic History at the University of Heidelberg, Sophia University (上智大学) in Tokyo, the University of Leipzig, and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Previously, I have done research on gender, space, and mobility in Bangladesh and conducted archival research on the Bengali community in the UK around 1970.