Michaela Schäuble

Michaela Schäuble is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), where she also received a Ph.D. in 2010. She studied comparative literature and social anthropology at Tübingen University and Yale University, and holds an M.A. in Visual Anthropology from the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology at Manchester University (UK). In 2011-12, she was a EURIAS Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Bologna (Italy). She has authored numerous articles on the impact of violence on memory politics, the gendered character of ethno-nationalist discourse, and post-war transition in the former Yugoslavia. In her forthcoming book, Narrating Victimhood: Gender, Religion and the Making of Place in Post-War Croatia (Berghahn Books), she addresses the politics of ambiguous Europeanness and (in)subordination in the Balkans. Michaela is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has published widely on documentary films and on the role of fiction and animation in ethnographic cinema. In her current project, “The Art of Controlled Accident”: Corporeal Cinematography in Ethnographic Films on Trance and Spirit Possession (1940s-1960s), she investigates the corporeal and sensory dimensions of religious ritual practice and embodied spiritual experience in early ethnographic documentary films, comparing audio-visual material from West Africa, Haiti, and Italy.