I am a social and cultural anthropologist with regional focus on South Asia and Southeast Asia. My research has focussed on cities, mobilities, and visual media. I have conducted ethnographic research in India and with overseas Indian groups, which resulted in the PhD thesis Mobility and the Region (University of Amsterdam 2016), the monograph New Lives in Anand (University of Washington Press 2022), and several films and articles. My new project Cycling Together (funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF, 2026-30) is situated in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. It investigates how bicyclists know and mediate the urban environment, and - on a more abstract level - how anthropological ways of knowing can support initiatives that try to make cities more sustainable.

I am a tenured associate professor at the University of Vienna, where I serve as vice-head of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology and head of the Vienna Visual Anthropology Lab. I am associate editor of the journal Asian Anthropology and co-convener of the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association for Social Anthropologists (VANEASA). In the past I held positions at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, University of Tübingen, and the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore (NIAS).