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 at the Institute for European Ethnology. The Office for Everyday Culture connects ethnographic research in Berlin and Brandenburg with teaching on archives, heritage, museums, and curatorial practice in the Institute and wider public, artistic, scholarly, or museum professionals in Berlin and Brandenburg and beyond. The Office also coordinates the archives and collections of the Institute for European Ethnology and acts as a public documentation and research laboratory. Beyond this, the Office also facilitates experimental collaborations 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 a member of the Centre for Cultural Technique, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin's transdisciplinary theory and practice-oriented research and teaching central institute directed by Sharon Macdonald, and the Collection Coordination of the university, where I represent the Office for Everyday Culture in the Collections Council. I am a member of the "Netzwerk Landesstellen und außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtungen" of the German Association for Empirical Cultural Studies (DGEKW), the Netzwerk Alltagskultur Ost, and invited member of the Academic Committee of The Museumslab (daad/Auswärtiges Amt). 

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. 

For a more detailed CV, please check here. 

Amo Salon Exhibition Space

Together with Magdalena Buchczyk and Melanye Garland, I am responsible for our Amo Salon Exhibition Space. If you are interested in proposing an exhibition, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us for an initial conversation. For existing proposals, you can directly send us your proposal using our online form. You can find all the information in German and English here.

Berlin-Brandenburgische Landesstelle für Alltagskultur

For more information, please check 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. We also entertain an instagram account, which can be found as The Office for Everyday Culture.

Exhibitions

"Archive Mirrors / Mirror Archives". Three Fragements by Lorenzo Sandoval, curated by Jonas Tinius. Amo Salon Exhibition Space and Office for Everyday Culture Archives, Institute for European Ethnology, 16 October - 18 December 2025, 5pm. More info here. 

"an-archē. troubling archival ecologies". Exhibition with the students of the BA-Seminar "Die Archive der Landesstelle", curated by Jonas Tinius. Amo Salon Exhibition Space and Office for Everyday Culture Archives, Institute for European Ethnology, 10 February - 18 July 2026, 5pm. More info here. 

Talks and presentations

For an updated list of current and upcoming talks, please check here. 

Current projects

March-July 2026. 'Die Stadt als Archiv. Das Klaus Ronneberger Schallplattenarchiv'. Funded by the Collections Council of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, coordinated together with Manuela Bojadzijev. 

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.

From January-December 2026, Melanie Garland (artist, anthropologist) will be hosted as a guest researcher to work with the Office for Everyday Culture on the project "A toolbox for para-archival mediation: practices for navigating difficult heritage". More information here.