Prof. Dr. Mirjam Brusius
Institut für Ethnologie
Hauptgebäude, Raum 4.216
E-mail: mbrusius[@]uni-koeln.de
Kurzbiografie und weitere Angaben
Kurzbiografie
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
Forschungsschwerpunkte
- 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
Aktuelle Forschungsprojekte
The Museum of Lost Objects (working title, book project)
A global history of Western museums that challenges the idea of museums as stable sites of preservation. Focusing on loss, destruction, and disorder—from bombed galleries to uncatalogued storage—the book traces the unstable trajectories of objects excavated in the Ottoman Empire and its successor states and situates museum collecting within British, French, and German imperial contexts.
Museum Storage and Meaning
This project examines museum storage as a political, ethical, environmental and philosophical problem. It shifts attention from galleries to the vast majority of collections held out of public view, analysing storage as a space shaped by concealment, colonial violence, and unresolved histories on the one hand, and new potential histories on the other.
100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object
I am one of the founding project leaders of 100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object, an award-winning collaborative digital initiative that foregrounds voices from the Global South. It challenges conventional museum narratives through object-centred storytelling and tells the stories of objects that have been sidelined by Western imperial histories. The initiative emphasizes indigenous, accessible, and diverse perspectives, transforming how we understand museum collections.