Prof. Dr. Mirjam Brusius
Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Room 4.216, Section 4, 2nd Floor
E-mail: mbrusius[@]uni-koeln.de
Short Biography and further Information
Short Biography
since 2026
Professorship at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
2017 – 2026
Research Fellow in Global and Colonial History, German Historical Institute London
2014 – 2016
A.W. Mellon Fellow, Faculty of History and Bodlein Libraries, University of Oxford, Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College Oxford and Early Career Fellow at TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities)
2013 – 2014
Postdoctoral Fellow, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University
2011 – 2013
Postdoctoral Fellow, Max Planck Society (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
2007 – 2011
Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science – Darwin College, University of Cambridge
Research Interests
- Preservation practices in global and comparative contexts
- The construction, governance, and contestation of heritage
- Colonial collecting, museums, and restitution
- Theory and history of the field sciences, including anthropology and archaeology
- Memory cultures, including histories of extinction, racial violence, and their commemoration
- Visual and material media, including photography and technoscience
Research Projects
Carbon Contradictions (Habilitation)
My current research focuses on environmental pollution, climate finance, and carbon accounting to understand their impacts on people’s daily lives, sociocultural values, and global visions of the future.
I explore how Chinese and transnational experts in government, state-owned corporations, and financial trading seek to quantify and monetize environmental behavior through the metric of carbon dioxide emissions. I connect the intersection of financial debt and green credit in regional carbon markets for industrial polluters that funded carbon offset projects, including fieldwork in a Chinese state-owned forestry farm. I also examine the role of digitisation for streamlining governance in the fields of resource management and environmental protection, particularly through CO2 footprint apps. These apps offset the carbon footprint of consumers by financing reforestation projects of climate refugees in a desert area, and reward users with green credits.
I argue that the utopian impulse of China’s transformation not only speaks to the state’s political hopes for redemption from industrial pollution, but also resonates with aspirations of citizens seeking to escape the unsettling effects of ecological degradation through the creation of an “ecological civilization” in China and beyond.
Funding:
Researcher-In-Residence in the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (2021 - awarded and declined), Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Deutsches Museum
https://www.carsoncenter.uni-muenchen.de/news/news_events/2020-news/jan-21-fellows/index.html
Frontlines of Value Research Group: Toppforsk grant from the Bergen Foundation and the Elite Professorship Program at the University of Bergen (2018-2021)
https://www.uib.no/en/frontlines/124753/charlotte-bruckermann
Financialization Research Group: Max-Plank-Institut für ethnologische Forschung (2016-2018)
Museum of the Commons
This project explores the role that contemporary art, inspired by ethnographic methodologies and an anthropological framework, can have in the study of contemporary societies and cultures and in fostering civil participation. Our joint research (Massmiliano Mollona, Susanne Brandtstädter, Charlotte Bruckermann) focuses on the possibility of a Museum of the Commons – a place where economic practices become configured and reconfigured in art, and where social experiments in art take ethnographic methodologies as a starting point for social engagement and for the commoning of skills, knowledge, property, and ecological resources,
Funding: Erich Auerbach Institute for Advanced Studies (2023)