Research

As an anthropologist, I am interested in how the past informs the present, contemporary sociopolitical challenges, and why humans resort to and commemorate political violence.

My current book project Beyond What’s Left: Nicaraguan Transnational Solidarity and Political Exile in Germany entails a transnational and -temporal analysis of the Nicaraguan Sandinista Revolution’s afterlives in Germany. Based on sixteen months of multisited ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I examine the transnational solidarity movement that emerged in Berlin as a response to the brutal repression of mass protests in 2018 in Nicaragua. Examining the negotiations between recent Nicaraguan political exiles, the Nicaraguan community in Berlin, and (former West-) German solidarity brigades, it analyzes how political, cultural, and historical linkages have informed different interpretations and practices of solidarity. This research has been supplemented with postdoctoral research project on political exile in the 21st century by looking into Nicaraguan exiles’ digitally disseminated poetry.

My current research project explores broader questions on revolutionary legacies of the former West German Red Army Faction (RAF), including how these memories of violence have been strategically used by Germany’s far right, and the gendered and historically rooted production of the public image of domestic terrorists.

I also think and write about contemporary zeitgeist, such as analyzing the popular TV show White Lotus (HBO) with a critical lens on privilege, power and desire.

My research has been supported by the Wedel Jarlsbergs Fund for International Research, the Sylff Young Leaders Fellowship Fund, the Forum for Philosophy of Science at the University of Oslo, the Ryoichi Sasakawa Post-Doctoral Research Grant (2022 and 2024), a Charles E. Scheidt Postdoctral Fellowship, the Individual Development Grant of the United University Professionals at New York State, the Professional Staff Senate Professional Development Grant at Binghamton University, the scholarship for equal opportunities at the University of Bayreuth, the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, and the University of Bayreuth’s Talent Fund.

I received my PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo in 2023 with stays at the University of Cambridge, the Graduate Institute Geneva and the University of Arizona (Tucson). I also held a Charles E. Scheidt Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at Binghamton University. I am currently a lecturer and senior researcher (akademische Rätin auf Zeit) at the University of Bayreuth’s Chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology.

I am the co-editor-in-chief of Anthropology in Action (together with Pardis Shafafi).

I am also a newly minted early career fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at Bielefeld University (“Das Junge ZIF”) (2025–2029).

My pronouns are she / her.