Participants

[in alphabetic order]

Katyayani Dalmia (University of Zurich) is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies (ISEK), University of Zurich. After studying Sociology at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, she earned a PhD in Anthropology from The New School for Social Research, New York. Katyayani’s research, and current book project, investigate how people link bodily traits with caste, class and gender in everyday life in North India. 

Sinah Kloß (University of Bonn) holds a PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology from Heidelberg University. Since February 2020 she is leader of the research group “Marking Power: Embodied Dependencies, Haptic Regimes and Body Modification” at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn.

Anne Kukuczka (FU Berlin) is a research associate in the DFG project “Formations of the Gendered Self and Imaginations of Urban Modernity in the Chinese Periphery” at the working group “Gender, Body, Sexualities”, Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, FU Berlin. She is also a PhD candidate at the Department for Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich. In her research she examines the everyday lifeworlds of women in urban Tibet through an exploration of their aesthetic self-making practices as well as imaginations and practices of modernity, femininity and the ‘good life’.

Suvi Lensu (University of Edinburgh) is a PhD candidate in African Studies and Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University and simultaneously part of the ANTHUSIA (Anthropology of Human Security in Africa) research project. By drawing from feminist anthropologist methods, her research examines gendered livelihoods and identity construction in the East African borderlands. Suvi is also a newsroom member at AntroBlogi, a Finnish language anthropological online journal.

Claudia Liebelt (FU Berlin) is a professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University of Berlin. Her primary research interests are in the Anthropology of the Body and the Senses, gender and sexuality, as well as postsecularism and religion, with a focus on the Middle East and Turkey. She is the author of Caring for the ‘Holy Land’: Filipina Domestic Workers in Israel (Berghahn, 2011) and Istanbul Appearances: Beauty and the Making of Middle-Class Femininities in Urban Turkey. (Syracuse UP, forthcoming). 

Wai Lok NG, born and raised in Hong Kong, is a lifelong patient of eczema, a skin allergy condition. He is currently a student in MA Education at University College London. Previously, he studied an MSc in Social Anthropology of Childhood, Youth, and Education at Brunel University London and a BSSc in Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Heather Mellquist Lehto (Arizona State University) is a cultural anthropologist researching technology, religion, and kinship in South Korea and the United States. She is a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University and a visiting fellow at the Academy for Korean Studies. Her current research project, „Skinship: Communion and Contagion in South Korea,“ examines kinship and its relationship to new knowledge and practices relating to human skin.

Diana Mignano (University of Bayreuth) is a Junior Fellow at the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies -BIGSAS at the University of Bayreuth. The topic of her doctoral thesis is: “Emergence and development of intimate, affective, and romantic liaisons in the context of economic-sexual exchange in Diego Suarez – Madagascar”. Historian from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana of Bogota with a master’s degree in Social Anthropology, Sociology and African Studies from the University of Bayreuth. Her main research topics are prostitution, sexuality, love, women, body, emotions, and gender relations in the African context.

Severin Penger (FU Berlin) is a social anthropologist, currently holding a scholarship from the German “Studienstiftung” for his PhD-project “Traces of a City: Tattoos in Naples”, which he is completing at FU Berlin. After his studies in Munich, Pachuca de Soto and Havana his book Tätowierte Tropen. Gestochene Geschichten aus Havanna was published in 2017 (open access).

Thuy Linh Tu (New York University) is Professor of American Studies in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, where she also serves as the faculty director of the Prison Education Program’s Research Collective. She is the author of Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021) and The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (Duke UP, 2011), and co-editor of the volumes, Fashion and Beauty in the Time of Asia, Alien Encounters: Popular Culture in Asian America, and Technicolor: Race and Technology in Everyday Life. Her current research project, „The Chinese in Indian Land,“ examines the „insourcing“ of textile manufacturing from China to the U.S. south and the shifting meanings of race and region at the twilight of U.S. industrialization. 

Matthew Raj Webb (New York Unversity) is a filmmaker and Ph.D. student in Cultural Anthropology at New York University (Program in Culture and Media). His research explores the politics surrounding circulation and ownership of craft knowledge in the fashion industry, with fieldwork in India and the US. Forthcoming publications include, “Henna’s New Medium: Dilemmas in Translating Color and Culture from Skin to Cloth,” in the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles Vol. 4, co-authored with Nikita Shah, and a new film entitled, „Behind the Seams: Alexander McQueen,“ exploring the history of labor and creative exchange between this British fashion designer and Indian textile embroiderers.