Olaf Zenker

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Biography

After earning Master’s degrees in Social Anthropology (London School of Economics and Political Science) and Linguistics and Literature (University of Hamburg), Olaf Zenker completed his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 2008 and his Habilitation at the University of Bern in 2015.

Following academic appointments in Cologne, Berlin and Fribourg, as well as visiting professorships and research fellowships in Europe, Africa and North America, he has been Full Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg since 2019 and has repeatedly served as Head of Department for Anthropology and Philosophy.

His research focuses on justice, contested normativities, legal and political anthropology, normative pluralism, postliberal transformations and anthropological approaches to the Anthropocene. Based on long-term ethnographic research in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Germany, he examines how norms, meanings and claims to justice are produced, negotiated and transformed under conditions of social and political change.

He is Teaching Faculty and Programme Committee Member of the International Max Planck Research School “Global Multiplicity – A Social Anthropology for the Now” (IMPRS-GM) and Principal Investigator of the DFG Scientific Network “Law in the Anthropocene”. He currently holds a Visiting Fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Legal Unity & Pluralism” in Münster, serves as President of the Rector’s Commission “Anton Wilhelm Amo” at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, and convenes the university’s annual AMO LECTURES.

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