Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Since April 2025, I direct the renamed and reframed Berlin-Brandenburgische Landesstelle für Alltagskultur (Office for Everyday Culture), which was founded in 1995 as the Landesstelle für Berlin-Brandenburgische Volkskunde. The Office for Everyday Culture gathers the archives, collections, and bequests of the Institute for European Ethnology and acts as a public documentation and research laboratory. Going forward, it facilitates collaborative possibilities with artists, curators, journalists, scholars, and students to work towards public anthropological engagement with (extra-)curricular knowledge production, archives, and university collections. To connect the Landesstelle with the university collections and exhibition research, I am affiliated with the Centre for Cultural Technique, directed by Prof Sharon Macdonald, which is a transdisciplinary theory and practice-oriented research and teaching central institute of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and the Collection Coordination of the university. 

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. My research focuses on 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. 

Berlin-Brandenburgische Landesstelle für Alltagskultur

Visit the Office for Everyday Culture website (link), consult the Collections Website of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (link), download the module "Volk" with Franka Schneider in our edited book Awkward Archives (link), or get in touch via email to arrange a visit or communicate a research or collaboration request. 

Exhibitions

"The Archive as Broken Mirror". Three Fragements by Lorenzo Sandoval, curated by Jonas Tinius. Amo Exhibition Space and Office for Everyday Culture Archives, Institute for European Ethnology, 16 October 2025, 5pm. More info soon. 

Events

22 April 2025. 'Forms of Friendship: Can Institutions Function as Infrastructures of Solidarity'. Book launch and Institutskolloquium seminar with Michal Murawski (UCL) and Paz Guevara (HKW). 4.30pm, Room 408. More info here. 

29 April 2025. 'Zwischen Utopie und Alltag. Die Landesstelle für Alltagskultur als öffentliches Labor'. Institutskolloquium des Instituts für Europäische Ethnologie, HU Berlin. Public event, no registration necessary. 2.30pm, Room 408. More info here. 

7 May 2025. 'Colonialism and Resistance'. Dialogue Keynote with Injonge Karangwa for the opening of 5th edition of The Museums Lab. More info here. 

20 May 2025. 'Every Monument Will Fall' (Dan Hicks, 2025). Book launch, discussion, reception. Public event, no registration necessary. 4.30pm, Room 408, IfEE. More info here. 

20 June 2025. “Narrative Machines Series and Exhibition-(un)Making”. A presentation and pre-exhibition iteration dialogue with artist Lorenzo Sandoval. Public event, no registration necessary. 2.30pm, Amo Salon (Groundfloor/Foyer), IfEE. More info here. 

4 October 2025. 'Ethnography by Surprise. Exploring the Potentials of Experimental, Playful, Speculative and Improvised Fieldwork'. Workshop with Elisabeth Luggauer and Ruth Eggel as part of "Surprise, chance, contingency: On the indeterminate in society and science", the 45th Congress of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Empirische Kulturwissenschaft (DGEKW) 2025 in Kiel. More info here.

16-19 October 2025. 'Styles of Experimentation. Unsettling the Anthropological Syllabus'. 4th workshop of the EASA network colleex - collaboratory for ethnographic experimentation. Berlin. More info here. 

31 October 2025. "Awkward Archives. Problematising Volk in a Berlin Photo-Collection". PRM Research Seminar in Visual, Material, and Museum Anthropology, Pitt-Rivers Museum + Department of Anthropology, Oxford University. More info soon. 

Current projects

July-October 2025. 'Decentring Knowledge Production: Innovating Public Anthropology in Postindustrial University Hinterlands'. Funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership. HU Project lead: Dr Jonas Tinius. Tandem partner: Prof Paul Basu (Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford).  

Guest researchers

In October 2025, Roger Sansi (Professor, Anthropology, Barcelona) will be visiting the IfEE through an Erasmus Faculty Exchange grant. We will launch our edited book The Trouble with Art. An Anthropology Beyond Philistinism (Routledge, 2025) and co-organise several seminars, including a guest seminar on the curatorial. Read more about our book here. 

From October 2025 to October 2026, Aoife Donnellan (PhD candidate, UCL Anthropology) will be hosted as a guest doctoral student at the IfEE for her project “Access is a Practice: Accessibility Methodologies in the Arts”. Read more about her project and bio here.