Hello!

I am a Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen, Germany - a position I took after almost thirteen years at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. Before that, I was a William Rainey Harper Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, where I also received my Ph.D.

My research interests have explored the politics and ethics of economic life, first through the fundamental re-arrangement of public institutions and their concomitant moralities under neoliberal conditions, and second through the the politics of water financialization and re-municipalization in austerity-era Europe. My first book (The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy, Chicago University Press 2012) explored neoliberal welfare “reforms” and the moral authoritarianisms (and struggles, tensions, contradictions) that often accompany them. My second book (A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgencies in Europe, Duke University Press, 2023) investigated the political, legal, and environmental struggles people wage as they seek to protect water as a public good or commons. Here, I was not only fascinated by the financialization of infrastructures and the continuing reconfiguration and evacuation of what “the public” is and might be, but by the new forms of political and legal imagination that took root as people attempted to reclaim their relationship to water. These topics have a profound urgency at a time where the interlocking crises of capitalism, democracy, and the environment have become more apparent than ever before.

The professorship I hold in Bremen is dedicated to “Maritime Anthropology and Cultures of Water,” which means that I will expand my interest in the anthropologies of water, environmental and infrastructural politics, democratic citizenship, lawmaking, and global extractive regimes to include the oceanic as well. In Bremen, I lead the Bremen NatureCultureLab. I also look forward to building a research profile among a group of institutions well known for their maritime expertise, notably Marum, the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, the Alfred Wegener Institut, the Leibniz Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung, and the Deutsche Schifffahrtsmuseum.

I am a Member of the Academia Europaea as well as current member of the Editorial Boards of Cultural Anthropology, American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History (CSSH), and the Cambridge Journal of Anthropology. I was also an elected Member of the Executive Board of the Society for Cultural Anthropology from 2017-2022. Between 2019-2021 I was a member of the fabulous board of The Blackwood as well as a co-organizer of Distribute2020.

What else? I grew up all over the place - Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Milan. After a short stint in Basel, Switzerland, I moved to Chicago, and after that to Toronto. I now live in Berlin with my family.