2025 - present
Research Fellow and Lecturer at University of Cologne

2025
Substitute Professor at University of Konstanz 

2021-2024
Research Fellow at University of Heidelberg

2020
Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore

2014 - 2018
Research Fellow at the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne

2009 - 2014
Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle/Germany)

2008 - 2009
Lecturer at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and WWU Münster

2002 - 2007
PhD in Social Anthropology and Modern History at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

1996 - 2002
MA in Social Anthropology, Modern History and Sociology at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

2001 - 2002
Erasmus program, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris/France)

• Historical Anthropology of upland Southeast Asia
• Economic Anthropology
• Ethnicity and Nationalism
• Memory Studies
• Southeast Asian History
• Lao Language and Culture

Oliver Tappe is Principal Investigator of the research group EE-LaoViet (Encounters and Entanglements: Localizing Global China in Laos and Vietnam) at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Cologne. He is responsible for the group’s project coordination and publication strategy, in collaboration with Vanina Bouté (EHESS Paris) who, as PI, represents the French side of the project. Oliver’s own research project within the EE-LaoViet framework investigates long-standing Chinese communities in north-eastern Laos, their local networks within this ethnically diverse region, and their relations with more recent migrants from China. His field site is located in Houaphan Province, where historical long-distance trade networks with Yunnan, Lao-Chinese sociocultural interactions and contemporary economic entanglements warrant closer examination. Oliver combines anthropological and historical scientific methods to form an original research approach for exploring past and present life-worlds in Laos. 

In a previous research project in the tin mining area of Khammouane (central Laos), Oliver studied Lao mining communities, which have been living in precarious coexistence with industrial mining operations since the colonial era. He explored the history of local mining practices, their socio-technical transformations from the late 19th century to the present day, and the culturally specific socio-cosmological aspects of mining. One key finding was the ongoing co-presence and sometimes overlapping of two different labour regimes that shape the tin mining sector: informal work relations in local artisanal and small-scale mining vs. wage labour in the industrial mines that were managed by the French (who mainly employed Vietnamese migrant labour) in the colonial past and are run by Chinese enterprises today (with a predominantly Chinese workforce).